The Lamp of the Wicked

1 Foul Water

IT WAS A crime, what he was doing, this Roddy Lodge, with his wraparound dark glasses and his whipped-cream smile.

The stories had kept filtering through, like foul water out of sludge, and Gomer Parry had felt ashamed to be part of the same profession. Plant hire was the poorer for shoddy operators like Roddy: wide boys, duckers and divers and twisters and exploiters of innocent people, rich and poor – mostly incomers to the county that didn’t know no better.

Too many blind eyes had been turned, this was it. Too many people – even so-called public servants, some of them – looking the other way, saying what’s it matter if a few Londoners gets taken down the road; they got money to burn.

Bad attitude, sneering at the incomers, ripping them off. They were still people, the incomers. People with dreams, and there was nothing wrong with dreams.

Mostly.

What about Gomer Parry, though? Would he have backed off like the rest or looked the other way, if he’d had any suspicion of how deep it went? What about Gomer? Just a little bloke with wild white hair and wire-rimmed glasses and a sense of what was right and honourable: the plant-hire code, digger chivalry.

No point in even asking the question, because, the way it started, this was just a drainage issue. Just a matter of pipes and shit.

It had seemed odd sometimes to Gomer that his and Roddy’s trenches had never crossed, even allowing for the fact that they operated from different ends of the county. Plant hire: big machinery in a small world.

But it was happening now, no avoiding it on this damp and windy Sunday – a weary old day to be leaving your fireside, and if Minnie had still been alive likely Gomer would’ve put it off. But the old fireside wasn’t the same no more, and she’d sounded near-desperate, this lady, and only up here weekends, anyway.

A Londoner, as you’d expect. Londoners were always looking further and further west in the mad rush to get country air down their lungs, like it was some kind of new drug. Rural properties in Herefordshire never stayed long on the market nowadays, especially the ones that really looked like rural properties, even if there were clear drawbacks.

Take this one. Classic example, see. What you had was this lovely old farmhouse, with a couple of acres, on the A49 between Hereford and Ross. Built in the rusty stone you got in these parts, and from the front there were good long, open views over flat fields to the Black Mountains.

But before that there was the A49 itself.

Gomer put a match to an inch of ciggy, October rain sluicing down on his cap, as another five cars and a big van came whizzing past – and this was a Sunday. All right, fair play, he spent his own days bouncing around on big, growling diggers, but no way Gomer could live so close to a main road like this, with fast cars and all the ground-shaking, fume-belching, brake- screeching juggernauts heading for the M50 and the Midlands.

Yet for this Mrs Pawson, in her tight white jeans, it was some type of peace, after London. Oh, we’d had enough of it, Mr Parry. Or, at least, I had. We couldn’t hear ourselves think any more, and I was convinced Gus had the beginnings of asthma. I told my husband that if we didn’t get out now we never would, not this side of retirement. We desperately needed peace, above all. Somewhere to walk.

Walk? Pretty soon, in Gomer’s view, you’d give up going for walks, being as how there was a good two hundred yards of no-pavement between you and the nearest public footpath. For half the price, the Pawsons could’ve got theirselves a modern place, with no maintenance headaches, up some quiet lane.

But modern places weren’t part of the dream. This was the dream: eighteenth-century, a bit lopsided, no damp-proof course, dodgy wiring.

And private drainage.

The FOR SALE sign lay in the damp gravel at the side of the driveway. Gomer reckoned it’d be back up in the hedge within the year. They’d get their money back, no problem at all – the way Hereford prices were going these days, they’d likely get it back twice over. Even allowing for what it was going to cost them to put this drainage to rights, after what Roddy Lodge had done to it.

Gomer tramped back up the drive, past his bottle-green van. It had GOMER PARRY PLANT HIRE on the sides and across both back doors in white. Nev’s idea, this was – You gotter advertise, Gomer, gotter put it about, see. Your ole clients is dyin’ off faster ’n you can dig their graves.

The other side of the van, Gomer could see the top of the installation poking out of the grass not two yards from the property.

Efflapure: state-of-the-art sewerage.

Gomer had never even heard of an Efflapure before. Nev was likely right about him losing touch. He was well out of touch with the kind of rip-off junk getting unloaded on city folk who thought all they had to do was flush the lavvy and the council did the rest.

As for where Lodge had put it – un-bloody-believable!

‘Mr Lodge showed us several brochures,’ Mrs Pawson had told him earlier, ‘and gave us the telephone numbers of two other people who’d had these particular models installed.’

‘Phone ’em, did you?’

Mrs Pawson hadn’t even looked embarrassed. ‘Oh, we had far too much to think about.’

Woulder made no difference, anyway,’ Gomer conceded. ‘Both be stooges, see. Friends of his, telling you you couldn’t get no finer system anywhere in the country. Load of ole wallop.’

He started scratting about in the fallen leaves, uncovering a meter-thing under an aluminium shield, with another one like it inside the house, to tell you where the shit level in the processing tank was at. Waste of time and money. Folk had got along happily for centuries without knowing where their shit level was at.

Presently, out she came again, under a big red and yellow golfing umbrella.

‘So what’s the actual verdict, Mr Parry?’ Attractive-looking lady, mind, in her sharp-faced way. Fortyish, and a few inches taller than Gomer, but weren’t they all?

‘You wannit straight?’ Gomer took out his ciggy. Mrs Pawson was looking at it like he’d got a bonfire going with piles of old tyres. She took a step back.

‘It’s the reason we came to you, Mr Parry. Our surveyor said that you, of all people, would indeed give it to us… straight.’

Gomer nodded. This surveyor, Darren Booth, he was a reputable boy. He’d said these Pawsons could be looking at trouble, and he wasn’t wrong. Gomer looked over at the Efflapure, blinking through his rain-blobbed glasses.

‘All your ground’s to the far side of the house, ennit? That orchard?’

‘We did try to acquire some more, but—’

‘And how far’s he from the house?’ Gomer nodded at the Efflapure. ‘Four foot? Five foot? Bugger-all distance, ennit? You don’t do that, see, Mrs P. Should’ve been set back, that thing, well bloody back. Likely Lodge done it this way to save a few yards o’ pipe and having to go into the old orchard, mess with roots and stuff. But you never digs it in that close to a house, specially—’

‘We specifically…’ Mrs Pawson all but stamped her nice clean trainer in the mud. ‘We specifically told him that cost was not an issue.’

‘Ah…’ Gomer waved a hand. ‘Some folk, they’d cut corners for the sake of it. Don’t reckon he’d’ve passed on no savings to you, mind. So, er…’ Holding back a bit, because this wasn’t good. ‘What exackly did young Darren say could happen?’

‘He didn’t.’ Mrs Pawson shivered under her umbrella. ‘He just said it could become a problem and advised us to get a second opinion, and he suggested you, as… as the most honest contractor he knew. For heaven’s sake, Mr Parry, what does it mean?’

Staring at him, all wild-eyed. She was up here on her own this weekend – husband still in London, kiddie with the nanny – and she was finding out, in the mud and the rain and the wind, how country life wasn’t always a bowl of cherries. She looked thin and lost under the big brolly, in her white jeans and her clean trainers, and Gomer felt sorry for her.

He sighed. Nobody liked jobs like this, where you had to clean up after another outfit. But this time it was Roddy Lodge, and Roddy Lodge had it coming to him.

He went over to the house wall. No way you could be entirely sure, see, but…

‘See this bit of a crack in the stonework?’

‘Is that new?’

‘Sure t’be. What he’s done, see, is dug ’isself a nice pit for this article, eight, nine feet down, right up against the ole foundations.’

‘You’re saying’ – her jaw trembling – ‘it could cause the house to collapse?’

Gomer thought about this, pushing back his cap.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘not all the house.’

They agreed it needed moving, this Efflapure, to a safer location. If you accepted that such an object was actually needed at all.

‘See, I wouldn’t’ve advised you to get one o’ them fancy things,’ Gomer said. ‘Wasteo’ money, my view of it. You got a nice, gentle slope to the ground there. Needs a simpler tank and a soakaway, like there was before. Primitive, mabbe, but he works, and he goes on workin’. No problems, no fancy meters to keep checking. Low maintenance, no renewable parts. Get him emptied every year or two, then forget all about him. Tried and tested, see, Mrs P. Tried and tested.’

A gust of wind snatched at the brolly. Mrs Pawson huffed and stuttered. ‘So what on earth are we supposed to do with the… Efflapure?’

‘Get your Mr Lodge to take the whole kit back, I’d say. Tell him what your surveyor said. He’ll know Darren Booth, see, know how he puts ’isself around the county, talks to the right people, so if you and your husband puts it over to Lodge, tackful-like, that it wouldn’t look so good if it got out he’d been cutting corners to save ’isself a few quid, you’d have most of your money back off him pretty quick, I’d say.’ Gomer nodded seriously, figuring this was good advice – at least let Lodge know there were a few folk onto his games. ‘Who was it told you to go to the feller in the first place, you don’t mind me askin’?’

‘He…’ She brought out some folded paper from a back pocket of her jeans and handed it to Gomer. ‘Somebody… pushed this leaflet through the letter box.’

Gomer opened it out. There was a drawing on the front of a roses-round-the-door Tudor cottage. Cartoon man in a doublet-thing with a ruffle round his neck and a cartoon woman in a long frock and an old-fashioned headdress. They both had big clothes-pegs on their noses. Underneath the drawing, it said:

IN DAYS OF OLDE,

DAYS BEFORE…

EFFLAPURE

Gomer tried not to wince.

Mrs Pawson said in a panicky voice, ‘It was a local firm. We thought—’

Gomer shook his head. ‘Not what I’d call a firm, exackly. Lodge, he operates out of a yard, back of Ross-on-Wye, what I’ve yeard, with a coupler part-timers on sickness benefit.’

‘But he’s an authorized agent for… for Efflapure.’

‘Agent for more dodgy outfits than you can shake a stick at,’ Gomer said.

‘So you… You know him.’

‘Well… I knows of him. Seen him around.’

Roddy, with his baseball cap and his wraparound dark glasses. Roddy and his big, whipped-cream smile.

‘Can you…?’ Mrs Pawson gripped the shaft of the umbrella with both hands, knuckles white. ‘Can you take it away?’

‘Me?’

‘You could probably make some money out of it, couldn’t you?’

‘Well…’ Gomer scratched his cheek. ‘There are places one o’ these might be suitable. Working farm, light industrial, mabbe. We could likely come to an arrangement. But I gotter say, you’d be better off going back to this Lodge and—’

‘No!’ Her whole body a-quiver now. ‘I don’t want that. I don’t want him here again.’

Traffic swished past, all mixed in with the wind. There was a sudden thump in the leaves near their feet. Gomer saw that a big, ripe Bramley had tumbled from one of the trees, but Mrs Pawson jumped and looked behind her like it could be something a deal bigger than that. Now she was actually clutching his arm, the umbrella all over the place.

‘Mr Parry, how soon could you do it?’

‘You sure you don’t wanner talk this over with your husband?’

‘How soon?’

‘Well, you won’t be yere, will you, ‘less it’s a weekend?’

‘It doesn’t matter whether we’re here or not. Could you do it tomorrow?’

‘Tomorrow?’ Gomer was more than doubtful. ‘I’d have to put it to Nev – my nephew, my partner in the business…’

‘Look,’ Mrs Pawson said, teeth gritted, shivering seriously now, ‘I just want it out of the way. We’re new to the area and we made a mistake. It was a mistake and we’re paying for it. I want it out and I don’t want… him doing it, do you understand?’

Likely this was when Gomer should have spotted something. The look on her face: this kind of… well, fear, really. No getting round that.

The up-and-down of it was that he was sorry for this London woman, alone in her farmhouse with no farm attached, husband likely bored with it already. Smart-looking, educated woman washed up here, marooned in the flat fields with the traffic blasting past.

After what happened, he’d often think what else he might have said, how else he could’ve handled it – like stalling a while, taking advice, checking Roddy out a bit more. But what was to check out? What else was there to know about an operator, a wide boy, a conman, a ducker and diver, a bit of a poser?

‘Please,’ Mrs Pawson said.

Gomer wished he knew what else was bothering her but he figured she was never going to tell him. He nodded. ‘All right, then.’ What else could he say? ‘Tuesday. What about Tuesday?’

It didn’t feel right, even then.

2 Pressure

SOMETIMES, YOU JUST wanted to shake her. You wanted to get her into a corner and scream, Why don’t you just get on with it? You are a mature woman, you are unmarried. Like, being a priest is supposed to condition your hormonal responses or something? It’s the only life you’ve got, for Christ’s sake… whatever else you might think.

Jane was leaning forward, across the kitchen table, making no secret about trying to listen.

It was getting dark now in the big, beamed kitchen and Mum was partly in shadow, standing in the corner by the door, taking the call on the cordless. She looked very small but quite ghostly in her grey alb. Her expression hadn’t changed. Normally, when she picked up the phone and found out who was on the line, she’d react – like smile in relief, look curious, or maybe grimace. Like, she’d instinctively make a face if it was, say, the Bishop or – worse – Uncle Ted. The fact that there was no reaction at all this time meant that she was working seriously hard at concealing something she didn’t want Jane to know about. Most of the time, Mum was an open book – and it wasn’t by Proust or Joyce or anybody difficult.

So it was Jane who made the face. Like, was this ridiculous, or what?

‘OK. Fine, let’s leave it at that,’ Mum said, and stubbed out the line. She put the cordless on the dresser and stood looking at it for a fraction too long before turning back to look into the room. In the lamplight her face was soft and in the long linen alb she looked, for a moment, like a little girl waiting to go to bed. Just needed the teddy.

‘Cold call?’ Jane raised both eyebrows. ‘Emma from Everest? Stacey from Staybright?’

Mum came back to the table. She did look tired. Well, it had to be getting her down, this bobbing and weaving, covering her tracks.

‘You don’t have to do this, you know, Mum. Not with me.’

‘What?’ Now an expression: wariness.

‘I’m on your side. I like Lol. I mean, in other circumstances – like not involving my ageing parent – the twenty-something age gap between him and me would be as nothing. But, you know… if I can’t have him… What I’m saying is, if you want to arrange a little tryst, you have my blessing. And, er…’ jabbing a thumb towards the ceiling. ‘His too, I’d guess. He’s not inhuman. Presumably.’

Jane sat back, arms folded. For a moment, Mum was almost smiling. Then she said brusquely, ‘Don’t you have homework?’

‘Done it. Double free period this afternoon. However, if that’s code for you want me to leave the room so you can call back, exchange a few steamy intimacies, I’d be happy to—’

‘Don’t push it, flower,’ Mum said mildly.

‘Push it? Jesus, if anybody ever needed a good push…’ Jane subsided into her chair, drumming her fingers on the refectory table. This was not the time.

‘Look at the time.’ Mum closed her eyes, the childlike bit dropping away. She was thirty-seven now, no getting around that – heading for the rapid slide into cronehood, with her prospect of happiness, which had seemed so close, receding again. ‘Parish meeting at half-seven, and we haven’t eaten yet.’

‘Not a problem.’ Jane stood up. ‘Why don’t I go down the chippy?’

‘I thought you were boycotting the chippy.’

‘They’re now claiming they’ve stopped using animal fat. I can live with that.’

‘Would you?’ Mum looked grateful, dragging her bag from the dresser, pulling out her purse.

‘You want mushy peas, too?’ Jane asked.

After the kid had left, Merrily went into the scullery-office, closed the door, switched on the Anglepoise and sat down, pulling her black woolly cardigan over her alb. She thought about calling Lol back but then – parish meeting: income, cash flow… pressure – phoned Huw Owen instead.

‘You know everything,’ she said. ‘What line do I take on a mobile-phone mast in the spire?’

Huw said, ‘Cold over there, is it?’

‘Not by your criteria.’ Huw’s rectory was well up in the Brecon Beacons, above the snowline, where spring and autumn would wave to each other from either side of July.

‘I were only thinking about you earlier,’ he said. ‘You and your rock star. Serious, is it, or just a fling?’

Rock star: a touch of irony, there. She didn’t rise to it. ‘We’re permitted flings now?’

‘Merrily,’ Huw said, ‘these are the days of sex-change clergy, transvestite clergy, bondage clergy, cocaine clergy. I’d say, as long as it doesn’t involve Alsatian dogs… What’s Bernie Dunmore’s view?’

‘Up to the individual conscience. Between the individual and God.’

‘Nice. You can tell why he made bishop. And what’s God say?’

‘He says to get on with it or Jane’ll be back with the chips.’

She pictured Huw slumped, shoeless and shaggy-haired, in front of his fire of coal and logs, the uncurtained window a cold blue square in the whitewashed wall. From the edge of his sheep-shaven lawn, you could see the site of the cottage where Huw had been born a bastard, as he liked to phrase it, two years before his mother took him off with her to Sheffield, to grow up a Yorkshireman with a weight of Welsh on his back.

Huw Owen: the mongrel come home to the hills. Merrily’s Deliverance-tutor, her spiritual director.

‘Aye, go on, then,’ he said. ‘Mobile-phone masts? The tips of the Devil’s horns.’

Crossing the market place in the damp dusk, Jane looked back once. Through the heavy, dripping autumn trees, the lights of Ledwardine Vicarage were blurred, as though seen through tears, and she was wondering about Mum and Lol and how it could possibly be going wrong so soon.

All through the late summer, Mum had seemed brilliantly light and girlish, maybe for the first time since she’d been ordained. Twice, she’d actually worn this provocatively low-cut top Jane had brought back from a summer sale in Hereford as kind of a joke.

Jane had imagined the skimpy thing lying on the floor of Lol’s loft and was entirely cool about the notion. Mum had been a widow for over six years now and, although the crash that had killed Dad on the M5 had been a drastic kind of reprieve from a marriage gone bad, it was time to dump the guilt for ever.

It had to be guilt, didn’t it? Mum had always been good at guilt, on any level. During the summer, Lol had written this song, ‘The Cure of Souls’, about the problem women priests might have loving God while also loving a man.

Which was only a problem if you believed that God was a man. If you believed that God was anything.

And if this thing – this faith in something unknowable, unprovable and very possibly bollocks – was likely to screw it up for Mum and Lol, there was no way Jane could live with that… like, even if she had to stand out here in the square and publicly burn Bibles on the cobbles.

The violence of the thought disturbed her a little. Pulling her beret down over her headphones, she switched on the Super Furries’ Rings Around the World to blow it all away, crossing now into Church Street, with its lamplit black and white façades, moving under the dimly lit windows of the former Cassidys’ Country Kitchen. At least the Cassidys had tried to serve traditional local produce, whereas now the place was charging an arm and a leg for two bits of squidge cradled in a red lettuce leaf. Gourmets were said to travel from three counties to eat here, but local people only ever came once – probably calling at the chippy on the way home.

This was typical of the way the village was going. With another overpriced antique shop and poor Lucy Devenish’s old Ledwardine Lore turned into some rip-off, designer-trivia emporium pretentiously called Ledwardine Fine Art, it was close to becoming unbearably chic, with coachloads of French and Japanese tourists, like in the Cotswolds.

At least the chippy was still in business. Jane slipped into Old Barn Lane, where its single window gleamed grease-yellow in the drizzle. This year, autumn had come down hard and fast, like some dank, grey roller blind. No Indian summer, no golden October days, and too late for all that now.

She bought cod and chips, twice. She and Mum didn’t eat meat at all any more, but occasionally relapsed into eating fish. After all, Jesus had eaten fish, hadn’t he? Jesus, in the right mood, would double your catch. Jane stepped down from the shop doorway, holding the chip package away from her fleece.

‘Jane – tell your mother not to be late tonight, won’t you?’ Uncle Ted Clowes stood there, merging with the greyness, bulky and stupidly sinister in his wide-brimmed Mafia hat. Until his retirement, Uncle Ted had been a solicitor, and you still couldn’t trust the old bastard. He didn’t like Mum being Deliverance consultant because it regularly took her out of the parish, out from under his thumb – which was probably the only truly worthwhile aspect of the whole crazy Deliverance thing.

Jane looked up. ‘What’s the problem… Ted?’ In the light from the steamy window, his wide face looked like ridged sandstone; he hated it when she talked to him like an equal. She grinned. ‘Not… the great Commercialization-of-the-House- of-God storm?’

It’s a contentious issue,’ Ted said heavily, ‘and it needs to be resolved before it starts to split the village. Your mother knows that.’

Meaning he didn’t want it dividing the ever-diminishing percentage of villagers who actually went to church. Not much of an issue at all, then. Jane converted the grin into a sweet and sympathetic smile. ‘I’ll get her bulletproof vest out of the airing cupboard.’

‘One day, Jane,’ said Uncle Ted, ‘you’ll learn to take some things seriously.’

‘And the day after that, they’ll bury me.’ Jane refixed the headset. ‘Better split or the chips’ll be cold.’

Get a life, Ted.

She walked back through the village, its windows like Christmas lanterns. So far this year, it had been featured in three national-newspaper holiday supplements. Among the cars parked on the square – and taking up enough space for two – was this great long blue and cream Cadillac.

Ridiculous, really. Soon, it was going to be like living in one of those pottery villages that Ledwardine Fine Art was too upmarket ever to sell. Maybe each pottery village should have its own bijou pottery lady vicar. So much more tourist appeal than a crumpled old priest with a frayed dog collar and breath that smelled of communion wine.

‘Once upon a time,’ Huw said wistfully, ‘folk believed the world were surrounded by angels, wing-tip to wing-tip. Interesting concept, eh? Everybody under the protection of vast, angelic wings, like newborn chicks.’

‘Bit claustrophobic, though, when you think about it,’ Merrily said.

‘Also, the ultimate communication system. Safe, reliable…’

‘Ah. Right. I see where you’re coming from.’

‘But where do they go now, the angels? No room left up there for the poor buggers, with all them signals clogging up the atmosphere – radio waves, satellite TV, daft sods in supermarkets ‘ringing home half a mile away.’ Huw put on a whiny Home Counties drawl. ‘“Darling, I’m at the cheese counter now – do we want Emmental or smoked Cheddar?”’

‘So it’s fair to say you’re against masts, then.’ Merrily wondered if Huw ever visited a supermarket, the way she often wondered why no woman appeared to have shared his life. He’d mentioned one once, in passing – just the once – but she’d sensed there was sadness attached.

‘It’s easy money, lass,’ he said. ‘Lot of space doing nowt inside church spires. No maintenance costs. Ten grand a year or more in the parish coffers. Environmentally friendly, too, on one level. Saves putting up them unsightly steel things on the hills.’

‘But on another level, it could be causing cancer, damaging people’s brains, et cetera. A lot of evidence piling up there.’

‘Aye.’

‘However, we’re likely to get a mast anyway. Some farmer or other’s going to give permission sooner or later for one of your unsightly steel things. So that’s still bad health all round and a spoiled view.’

‘You’d be reluctantly in favour, then,’ Huw said.

‘Well, no. I’m instinctively against it. But we could use the money, and Uncle Ted’s smart. He knows that if he backs down on mobile phones, it’ll be much harder for me to resist his plans for putting a gift shop in the vestry. I’m in a corner, Huw, and the meeting starts in about forty minutes.’

Merrily glanced at the scullery window, where the climbing rose used to knock against the glass in the night wind. Although she’d pruned it last spring, she half expected it to have grown back: tock… tock… tock…

‘And the Hereford Times is hovering, because the mobile phone company looks like it’s one of those about to start transmitting soft porn to new-generation handsets. I don’t want to wind up in the papers again.’

‘Stay out of it,’ Huw said. ‘Let the parish council take the decision, but make sure you nobble a few of them first.’

Politics. I hate all that.’ Merrily gazed into the Anglepoise circle of light enclosing the Bible, her sermon pad and a volume of the Alternative Service Book, 1980. In His Presence, it said on the front. ‘Erm… would there be a Deliverance angle?’

‘On mobile phones?’

‘Transmissions. Signals… all that. I suppose that’s why I’m ringing, really.’ She heard footsteps on the kitchen flags; the chips had come.

‘Spirits in the air?’ Huw said.

‘Something like that.’

‘Or you could say the spire, which should be pointing to heaven, would be acting instead as a conductor for all kinds of shit thrown up from the earth.’

‘You put these things so elegantly,’ Merrily said.

‘Stuff the Parish Council. Say no to it, lass.’

‘Right.’

3 Something Ancient Being Lost

I MEAN, LET’S face it, nobody comes to church just to hear me preach…

It had just slipped out, and now they were all staring at her, as though she’d blasphemed in public or something.

Whatever you said always sounded more strident in the parish hall, the one building in mellow, timber-framed Ledwardine without a soul. The hall had been built in 1964. Its pink bricks and white tiling put you in mind of a disused abattoir; its caged, mauvish ceiling lights made faces gleam like raw meat.

‘What I meant’ – Merrily almost squirmed in her plastic chair – ‘is that I’ve never really thought of myself as much of an orator. I’m… not always entirely comfortable in the pulpit. Like, who am I to step up there and lay down the law?’

Now she’d made it worse. She looked quickly around the table from face to face, aware that she was blushing because it could have been taken as a reference to her private life. She wondered if any of them knew about her and Lol. Maybe they all did. Maybe it was all over the parish. Harlot.

‘Well, since you ask, Mrs Watkins…’ The chairman, James Bull-Davies, looked half-amused. ‘My understanding of the situation was that, for this short period every Sunday, the vicar was supposed to be some sort of mouthpiece for the Almighty. Suffused with the Holy Spirit. Or have I got that wrong?’

Merrily felt in need of a cigarette. She also felt like laying her head on the table and covering it with her arms.

‘That’s a little unfair, Mr Davies.’ The soft, mildly Irish voice of Mrs Jenny Box drifted like scented smoke from the far corner. ‘Mrs Watkins was displaying simple humility, and if that isn’t part of God’s core agenda for us all, then I don’t know what is.’

‘Oh Gord!’ James Bull-Davies leaned back abruptly, to vague splintering sounds from his carved wooden chair. ‘Shut your damn mouth, James.’ He waved a hand in exasperation. ‘Anyone object if we drag this discussion back to our agenda? Or else we’ll be here till the pubs’ve closed.’

James was chairing the meeting on military lines, eight tables arranged into a square. You felt that there should be sand trays and little model tanks. But it was good, Merrily had reflected, to have him back. He’d been out of village life for over a year, gathering his private affairs into some kind of order. Now, he and Alison were breeding horses professionally, and Upper Hall farmhouse was getting its leaking roof retiled.

In the semi-feudal past, it had been understood that the Bull family fortune should also maintain the fabric of the parish church; nowadays it was accepted that the odd crumpled tenner in the collection was going to be James’s limit. The church was on its own now. It needed more income, short and long term.

‘Sorry,’ Merrily said. ‘My fault.’ In a roundabout way, she’d been attempting to make the point that, while incorporating a gift shop could be a good idea, the parish church should also be available simply as a quiet, sacred place – that it wasn’t only about hymns and preaching. It wasn’t only about Sunday.

‘Look, I’m not…’ Uncle Ted Clowes raised himself up. He looked irritated. ‘I’m not entirely getting this. How does running a small shop in the church prevent it being a place of sanctuary? No one’s suggesting the proposed outlet should be open for business all day and every day.’

‘No,’ Merrily said, ‘but the church itself should be.… within reason. But what I’m really saying is…’

And then she lost the thread. The problem was, she was still in two minds about this. She was all for the church becoming more open, less formal. Hadn’t she fought Ted’s plan to lock the doors nightly at six p.m.? Hadn’t she held out against parish purists outraged when she’d let Rex Rosser’s sheepdog, Alice, lie on a back pew next to Rex?

The harsh lights hurt Merrily’s eyes. There’d been no mention yet of the mobile-phone mast. Maybe Ted was thinking that if he could push the shop through without a struggle then he could slip the mast in near the end or save it for a future meeting – one even more poorly attended than this, with its handful of delegates from local societies: the Women’s Institute, the Young Farmers’ Club, the tourism association. A couple of shop owners had shown up to voice mild fears about competition if the church went into the giftware business. But nothing serious, nothing likely to cause undue worry for Ted Clowes and the pro faction.

‘I think the point is, Mr Chairman…’ Again, it was Jenny Box, née Driscoll, one of the few with no obvious reason to be here, who came to Merrily’s aid. ‘The real point is that commercial enterprise would surely conflict with the sanctity and peace that the church must be allowed to provide at all times. If I want to go in and say a prayer, I may not wish to do so in front of a coachload of holidaymakers choosing picture postcards.’

And Jenny Box did go into the church and pray alone. Merrily had seen her several times and walked delicately past with a quiet smile, making herself casually available, in case this woman needed help. No particular response so far, and she didn’t want to be thought of as courting the newest Ledwardine celeb.

The truth was that, while much of the village – especially the growing retired faction – recognized Mrs Box from daytime ‘lifestyle’ TV or had shopped at Vestalia, Merrily had never even seen daytime TV, except by accident, and couldn’t afford Vestalia. She was faintly embarrassed because the face of Jenny Box, from the start, had meant nothing to her.

But…’ Ted was looking pained. ‘If you look at Hereford Cathedral, it’s had a sizeable shop for years, virtually next to the nave.’

‘But not in the nave,’ Merrily said. ‘And the cathedral’s just a tiny bit bigger than Ledwardine church, and if you do want to pray there you can always find a quiet corner somewhere, or an empty chantry.’

‘Well, if…’ James Bull-Davies pushed fingers through his thinning hair. ‘… If you’re talking about a quiet place, there’s always the Bull Chapel, isn’t there?’

Merrily said nothing. Even she had found it hard to pray in the Bull Chapel.

Again, Mrs Box dealt with it. ‘I accept it’s your family’s traditional resting place, Mr Chairman, but I don’t think I’m alone in finding that chapel just a tiny bit sinister, with that forbidding old tomb and the effigy of the man whose eyes seem to follow you around. Sorry, I suppose that’s silly of me.’

James gazed at Jenny Box, as he had several times tonight because, although he’d probably never seen her on TV either, Mrs Box was magnetic, her beauty soft and blurred under red-blonde hair just short of shoulder-length. There was very little make-up on her pale, regretful face, but even the livid lighting couldn’t insult her skin. She lived in a narrow, three-storey house on the edge of the village, near the river – alone, it seemed, although there was said to be an estranged husband somewhere.

‘Right, OK,’ James conceded surprisingly. ‘Point taken. We require a degree of separation, so I think we have to come back to Ted’s suggestion of the vestry. Reasonable enough size. Not as if we’re going to be selling country clothes or picnic hampers or what have you.’

‘Well… it’s a possibility.’ Merrily had already thought about it; she didn’t use the vestry much any more, not since the night it had been broken into. Now she kept all her clerical gear at the vicarage, and there was a cupboard in the body of the church for communion wine and stuff. ‘I mean, I suppose I could spare it, but I can’t speak for a future minister.’

‘Not our problem,’ James snapped. ‘Future chap can sort himself out. Or herself. Be many years, anyway, before you think of moving on, I trust, vicar. Nothing to stop us sticking a couple of counters and a till in the vestry meantime, is there?’

‘It’d need better lighting for a start, James. And some structural alteration, I’d guess. Costly?’

‘But it’s an option,’ said James. ‘At last we have an option. Thank Gord for that. We’ll get it costed out, report back. Yes?’ He looked at Merrily; she shrugged.

When they came out, half an hour later, without anyone having raised the possibility of installing a mobile-phone mast in the spire, Merrily wasn’t entirely surprised to find Jenny Box, in a brown Barbour and a white scarf, waiting for her on the cindered forecourt.

‘Look, thanks for…’ Merrily gestured vaguely at the hall behind them. She felt short and inelegant in the old navy-blue school duffel coat that Jane had rejected as seriously uncool. ‘I get a little flustered in there sometimes. I think it’s the lighting, but if I turned up in sunglasses, somebody’d be putting it around that I’d been beaten up.’

Jenny Box didn’t smile. Uncle Ted Clowes came over and put a patronizing hand on Merrily’s shoulder. ‘I think you’ll find it makes a good deal of sense, my dear. Tourism’s going to be very much the future of Ledwardine, we all have to accept that.’

‘Not the whole of the future, I hope, Ted.’

‘Well, there is another possibility.’ He glanced warily at Jenny Box. ‘But we’ll talk about that again. Goodnight, ladies.’

Ted put on his hat and strolled away. A walkover, then. Merrily was aware that Jenny Box’s expression had stiffened. For the first time tonight, in the thin light from the tin-shaded bulb over the doors of the village hall, she looked her probable age: forty-three, forty-four?

‘Crass auld fool.’ An unexpected venom thickened her accent. ‘Sell his own grandmother.’

Merrily said nothing. The two of them walked away from the hall, into Church Street and up towards the square. The air glistened with moisture and the deserted village centre looked film-set romantic under a mist-ringed three-quarter moon.

‘So how much are you thinking you’d need?’ Mrs Box’s voice had softened again without losing any of its insistence. ‘For the church.’

‘Well, I can’t really…’ Merrily hesitated. It was the first time she’d spoken more than superficially to this woman.

‘Per year, say. How much per year, to maintain the church without the need of this tourist shop?’

It was a serious question, and there was no walking away from it. Merrily shook her head. ‘I don’t really know what a shop would turn over in a year.’

Mrs Box stopped on the edge of the deserted square. ‘Tell me, have you asked God?’

‘Sorry?’

‘For the money. For the resources. Have you asked God?’

‘Erm…’

Jenny Box smiled faintly, indicating that she wouldn’t pursue it now. Directly in front of them, the small medieval building known as the Market Hall squatted on its stocky oak pillars. Mrs Box stood with her back to it, hands thrust deep into the pockets of her Barbour, a firmer, tougher proposition than she’d been in the hall.

‘You were absolutely right, of course,’ she said. ‘Women, as a rule, aren’t terribly good at preaching. Listening is what we do best. That’s why women priests are so important. Women listen, and so women receive. I’m not talking feminist nonsense, but the time’s come. Don’t you feel that?’

‘I think we can all receive, women and men,’ Merrily said carefully. They were alone on the square, lit by bracket lamps projecting from gable ends. Mrs Box glanced over her shoulder.

‘That man – Clowes. What he said about us all having to accept that tourism’s the future, it makes me feel quite ill. Look at this place… it’s getting like the Cotswolds – most of the people here born elsewhere, virtually all the businesses owned by outsiders.’

Merrily said nothing. Across the square, the lighted panes in the leaded windows of the Black Swan seemed as comfortably irregular as the moon-washed cobbles. She used to think of Ledwardine as an indestructible organism that ate and gradually digested change.

‘Oh, I know I’m part of the invasion,’ Jenny Box said. ‘I can’t help that. But when I see them trying to make this lovely old church into just another arm of the tourist industry… and I watch men like Clowes, who must be at least half local, just sitting there on their fat, complacent behinds and inviting it in, for short-term gain, I see something ancient being lost… and something insidious and inherently filthy creeping in. I want to go up in the tower and ring the bells and scream a warning. Don’t you?’

‘I don’t know,’ Merrily said honestly. ‘In one way, I do want to get lots more people into church. I like the idea of these villages in parts of Italy and places, where the church is the natural centre of everything, people wandering in and out, hens laying under the pews. And yet…’

She looked up at the woman she vaguely recalled as a fashion model in the 1980s, pale and waiflike then, and a little damaged- looking, like an orphan taken in by Vivienne Westwood. Jane had said that once, when she was off school with flu, she’d seen Jenny Driscoll – newly arrived in the village then and a talking point – on some daytime chat show discussing fame, how shallow it all was. On the other hand, as Jane had pointed out, there were few aspects of modern life more shallow than daytime telly.

‘I suppose you think I’m just some bored neurotic looking for a cause, to get noticed. Just say if that’s what you think.’

‘Oh, everybody here gets noticed. The real trick is to be anonymous.’ Merrily smiled tiredly. Normally, she was invigorated by this kind of searching approach by an actual parishioner; she just didn’t feel up to it tonight. ‘I’m sorry, I should have got to know you better by now. I admit I haven’t spent as much time in the parish as I should have, due to one thing and another.’

‘Like being an exorcist,’ Jenny Box said, all whispery sibilance.

‘Deliverance Consultant is the preferred term these days.’

‘Well, I prefer the old word. How often are you called on to exorcize people?’

‘I never have.’

‘Never?’

‘Well, I’ve only had the job for just over a year. I’ve never encountered a… confirmable case of demonic possession.’

‘But you believe it can happen?’

‘Of course.’ Merrily wasn’t used to this. If local people ever talked about what she did outside the parish, it was never to her face.

‘What about houses? You exorcize houses, do you?’

‘Occasionally.’

‘And would you agree,’ Jenny Box asked, ‘that whole communities are sometimes in need of it? Whole establishments, situations… whole milieux?’

‘I’m not sure what you mean.’ Merrily was thinking of last winter and the fundamentalist, Father Nicholas Ellis, who’d exorcize anything you could shake a cross at.

‘Cleansing. The expulsion of evil. You probably know that the business I was in – when I was modelling – all that’s pretty damn repellent to me these days. And though I’m well out of it all now, it’s like when you give up some bad habit – smoking – you can’t bear to be near smokers any more. You can smell them a mile off, and it’s unbearably obnoxious, all the worse because it’s tinged with this… foul desire.’

‘Right.’ Merrily was instinctively feeling the outside of her coat pocket, the familiar bulge made by her mobile phone… and the packet of Silk Cut and the Zippo.

‘So coming out here was like going into detox for me. But why would I come here, you’re asking, to this particular village, to be cleansed?’

‘No, I wouldn’t ask that. I try not to be nosy.’

‘All right, then, why are you here?’

‘Oh, I ask that all the time.’

Mrs Box laughed lightly. ‘Vicar, tell me, have you ever had what you might call a visionary experience?’ Merrily stared at her; Jenny Box raised both hands. ‘I know, I know, it depends on how you’d define visionary. Oh, the clergy, you’re so cautious these days, even the women.’

‘Especially the women. We still feel we’re on probation.’

Jenny Box regarded her solemnly. ‘But you’re the future. You must know that. Look, I’d like to discuss this and… some other things with you sometime… if you have an hour or so to spare – I mean, not now. I can see you’re anxious to be off.’

‘Well, it’s just that my daughter—’

‘No husband, though,’ Mrs Box threw in quickly.

‘He died. Some years ago.’

‘A young widow, remarried to the Church.’

It was what people often said, and it was irritating. It began to rain again.

‘Which is a wonderful thing,’ Jenny Box said. ‘You were… saved.’ She smiled. ‘It’s hard to avoid the old clichés, isn’t it?’

Merrily heard a voice calling from somewhere down Church Street.

‘I’m learning all about that because I’m writing a book,’ Mrs Box said. ‘About some things that happened to me.’

‘Oh?’ No big surprise. Jenny Box: the heartache I left behind. Serialized in one of the Sunday papers, a women’s magazine. If it was sensational enough, if there were ‘revelations’.

‘Mum!’

Merrily turned, saw the kid running up the street. ‘I’m sorry… that’s Jane… my daughter.’

Jenny Box took a step back, and Merrily had a sudden powerful sense of something around this woman making small, anxious flurries in the air: disorientation, loneliness.

‘I’d… like to hear about your book sometime.’

‘It isn’t finished yet. It isn’t over, you see. What the book’s about… those things aren’t over. Those things have hardly begun.’ Jenny Box shook her head and began to move away. Then she stopped beside one of the pillars of the market hall, turning her face to Merrily. ‘You said we could all receive…’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, that…’ She looked at Jane stumbling to a stop, shook her head with finality. ‘Goodnight, Mrs Watkins.’

Pulling her scarf over her head, Jenny Box walked quickly away across the cobbles into the shadows behind the hanging lamps.

And here was Jane, the kid’s face shining with rain and sweat.

‘Oh God, Mum, I’ve run all the way down to the sodding hall. Tried to call you on the mobile.’

‘It was switched off. Didn’t want it going off in the middle of the meeting. What’s the problem, flower?’

Jane said, ‘Gomer.’

Merrily felt her stomach tighten. ‘What’s happened?’ She’d been half expecting Gomer at the meeting: the only parishioner you could always count on for support against the village establishment.

‘It’s awf—’ The kid was still struggling for breath. ‘Awful.’

‘What?’ Remembering the night last January when Minnie had had her heart attack, the hospital vigil with Gomer, the final silence of the side ward.

‘He came banging on the door. Didn’t know where else to go. He’d been in the pub and he’d had a few pints and he didn’t think he was safe to drive, so he was hoping you—’

‘Where?’ The rain was coming down harder. Jane had no coat, she must’ve gone rushing out in panic. ‘Drive where?’

‘He’d just got back from the Swan, OK, and… when he gets in the phone’s ringing and ringing. The police’d been trying to get him for, like, ages. He was hoping you could take him, but now he’s gone for his van, and he’s probably way over the limit.’

‘Police?’

‘It’s his yard in the Radnor Valley. His big shed. Mum, it’s on fire. The shed with the diggers and the bulldozer? It’s just all on fire. Gomer Parry Plant Hire… burning up.’

‘Oh God.’

‘He’s gone like really manic. You know how he gets. Even if he was sober, he wouldn’t be safe.’

‘When was this?’

‘Just a few minutes ago. He went tearing back for his van.’

‘OK, he’ll have to pass this way.’ The village was silent – no vehicle sounds. Merrily pulled out her mobile and switched it on. ‘Go back home, flower. I’ll call you.’

‘I’ll come too.’

‘No, you won’t. I’ll call you. Just go home and get dry. OK? I’ll call.’ Merrily pocketed the phone, put both hands on the kid’s shoulders and pointed her at the vicarage. ‘Go.’

She watched Jane walking across the empty street and into the vicarage drive, where the kid stopped and looked back.

‘And bar… Jane, bar the door, OK?’

Merrily stepped into the road and waited.

4 A Good Name

‘SORRY,’ SHE MUTTERED. Thorny branches in the hedge were scoring the side of the van. ‘Sorry.’

The problem was that although she could reach the pedals – just about – the driver’s seat was sunken with wear and the heavy old van was hard to control on bends and steep hills when you couldn’t fully see over the bonnet. Especially at night, in the intermittent rain, on these greasy country roads leading down to the Welsh border.

‘Should’ve gone back for your own car, vicar,’ Gomer murmured round his ciggy. ‘I’d’ve waited.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t.’

He said nothing. Hadn’t he nearly run her down, before he’d spotted the dog collar in the headlights and braked so hard he’d stalled the engine?

Gomer Parry stalling an engine – unheard of. He’d been as close then as she’d ever seen him to coming apart. The night Minnie died, his anguish had flared publicly, just once, in a twilit street near Hereford County Hospital, before he’d subsided into bleak acceptance.

Tonight, however, there was no sign of him coming down from whatever emotional ledge he was clinging to, and the ciggy was glowing red and dangerous between his lips. He wore his cap and his old tweed jacket and, underneath that, a green sweatshirt with GOMER PARRY PLANT HIRE on it in white.

This had been his nephew and business partner Nev’s idea. Gomer had had two extra ones printed – a serious honour – for Jane and for Merrily, whose churchyard hedges he cut, whose ditches he cleared and not a penny charged for any of it. He even came to church, maybe every other Sunday. But plant hire was Gomer Parry’s religion.

‘They don’t know how it started?’

Had she asked him this before? There were only so many things you could say en route to the ruins of a man’s whole identity.

‘If they knowed, they wasn’t sayin’. You know what cops is like. Plus, nobody seen it at all till the whole shed was well alight. Four fire engines called out. That big.’

Poor Gomer, hunched gnomelike on the edge of the passenger seat, his wire-rimmed bottle glasses opaque in the dimness of the van. Merrily guessed that what Gomer and Nev did probably didn’t even qualify as plant hire in the strictest sense. Mostly, they dug field drains and soakaways for septic tanks. They had two tractors, a lorry, a bulldozer and a couple of diggers, Gwynneth and Muriel, stored in a former aircraft shed, twenty minutes away, near a long-disused airstrip just across the Welsh border. Where the fire was happening.

‘What about insurance, Gomer?’

‘Oh, we’re insured, sure t’be. But that en’t the point, is it, vicar?’

‘No. I guess not.’ A couple of years ago, Gomer had been pressed by Minnie into semi-retirement and he’d let Nev more or less take over the business. But after Minnie’s death, he’d gone grimly back, full-time. Plant hire: now it was all he had left.

‘En’t the point at all,’ Gomer said sadly. They were held up by temporary traffic lights at roadworks on the edge of Kington town centre.

‘Does Nev know?’

‘Ah, he’ll still be out on the bloody piss – apologies, vicar. Nobody knowed which pub the bugger was in.’

Unlike his nephew, Gomer didn’t drink much at all these days. But earlier tonight, it seemed, he’d arranged to see a certain bloke in the Black Swan, about some job or other, and this particular bloke was a big boozer, and Gomer had felt obliged to keep up with him. Mabbe four pints, vicar, he’d confessed, surrendering the wheel. Tonight of all bloody nights.

When Jane had run up to Merrily on the square and said, It’s Gomer, her first thought had been that he’d had a stroke or a heart attack like Minnie, who would have loved to mind the souvenir shop in the church – nobody better, except possibly Miss Lucy Devenish who’d kept Ledwardine Lore. Both of them dead now. All the things that might have been. Everything changing before you were ready, like pages of a favourite book ripped out to reveal a different story and new characters you were supposed to relate to instantly, the old ones suddenly gone for ever.

The traffic lights changed at last, and Merrily drove through the damp and empty small town and out of England.

Most of the leaves around here must have come down in last week’s high winds. Between the stripped trees, you could see blue lights turning in the Radnor Valley below, beating at the mist, as though the night itself was strobing. No visible flames, only these gaseous blue lights and the off-white, misshapen moon bobbing in the mist over the border hills.

‘Take a left by yere, vicar.’ At the sight of the emergency beacons, Gomer’s voice had gone flat. ‘And keep slow.’

Merrily turned into a minor road, a fenced field on one side – stoical sheep-eyes in the headlights – and what looked like a quarry on the other. She drove on, in low gear, for about two hundred yards before the headlamps found a high wire fence and two metal wire-meshed gates, both hanging open. A police car, engine running, blue beacon revolving, was blocking the entrance. When Merrily wound down her window, there was the throb of other motors, a haze of headlights and a smell that filled up the van like poison gas: acrid, hostile.

A policeman walked over. ‘Gomer.’ And then he saw it was a woman behind the wheel. ‘Oh.’

Gomer was shouldering open the passenger door. ‘Couldn’t bring that torch from under the dash, could you, vicar? Your side.’

The policeman said, ‘You’ve brought the vicar?’

‘Little vicar brought me, Robbie.’

The policeman sniffed the air around Gomer and nodded, getting the message. Gomer would know most of the coppers around here, and their dads and grandads, too.

Merrily found the torch and climbed out of the van. Her legs felt weak. She’d never been to Gomer’s depot before. Looking around for the famous former aircraft shed, she saw only the harsh headlights of fire appliances and some other vehicles, and puddles swirling with beacon blue. A couple of firefighters were moving slowly around with hoses, amid eddies of smoke. They seemed to be spraying the earth, as if they were trying to stimulate growth, and she realized, shocked, that this was because much of the building must have fallen in around its contents. No flames were left anywhere; the firemen were just damping down, to make sure it didn’t reignite.

She saw the husk of a tractor or maybe a bulldozer, its windows all gone. Gomer spat his cigarette into a pool of rainbowed water and walked away from the policeman towards a pyramid of twisted galvanized roof-panels, about ten feet high and wreathed in stinking smoke. Merrily started to follow him, then gagged on a mouthful of the searing air – no autumn-bonfire scents here; this was chemical, astringent. She doubled up, coughing. Gomer looked back; she waved him on, pulling out some tissues to mop her flooded eyes.

When she was over it, she could see him talking to two coppers and a senior-looking fireman inside a steamy mesh of headlamp beams. There were other people around, another blue light. She straightened up, began to move towards them, and another fireman bawled at her.

‘Stay back!’

‘OK…’ Putting up her hands, backing off. The three-quarter moon gleamed off the flank of a digger lying tragically askew, like a great shire horse with a broken neck.

Gwynneth, or Muriel. Merrily felt close to tears. She saw the policemen leading Gomer back towards the van, the senior fireman following them, snapping questions.

‘… Oil tanks? Diesel?’

‘Tank was inside,’ Gomer said. ‘Locked up.’

‘Just the one?’

‘Ar. Locked up. Good locks.’

‘Who else had keys, Gomer?’ An older policeman: grey moustache and sergeant’s stripes.

‘Nobody else had bloody keys, Cliff! Me and Nev, just me and Nev. You saying some bastard let ’isself in? ’Cause you’d need a bloody oxyacetylene torch to break in yere, take it from me.’

‘Far’s I can gather, Gomer, there was no sign of a break-in when the fire brigade got here. No doors hanging open, nothing like that, nothing obvious. However—’

‘When was this, Cliff?’

‘Two hours ago, round about. It was well away by then.’

‘’Cause if you boys reckons this was done deliberate’ – Gomer turned to the older policeman, a forefinger waving – ‘then I can give you a name, straight off.’

‘Gomer, listen, we en’t saying nothing like that at this stage.’

‘A bloody good name, Cliff.’

Merrily blinked, confused. How could he possibly give them a name? Was there something she didn’t know about, something Gomer hadn’t told her? It went quieter suddenly, and she realized the hoses had been turned off.

‘Gomer, listen to me,’ Cliff said quietly, ‘before you start throwing accusations around… you seen Nev tonight?’

‘Eh?’

‘Nev.’

‘I never sees Nev at night.’ Gomer calmed himself down, bringing out his cigarette tin. ‘All right to smoke, is it?’

‘Rather you didn’t,’ the fireman said.

The younger copper, Robbie, put a hand over Gomer’s tin. ‘Because we can’t find him, see.’

‘He lives at Presteigne. Lot of pubs in Presteigne. You go round the bloody pubs, you’ll find him, all right.’

‘We know all that,’ Robbie said. ‘We know Nev’s been drinking heavy lately. Including tonight.’

‘Depends what you means by heavy,’ Gomer said guardedly.

‘The thing…’ The sergeant, Cliff, hesitated. ‘The thing is, Gomer… Nev got hisself thrown out of the Royal Oak earlier on. Been on the beer, gets into a barney with Clem Morris’s boy, Jordan, on account of Jordan thinks Nev’s after his girlfriend. Something and nothing, as usual, but it all gets overheated, and we get sent along to calm things down. And we strongly suggested to Nev that he oughter go home directly and sleep it off.’

‘Stupid fat bastard,’ Gomer said.

‘Only, we know Nev didn’t go home, see, or he didn’t stay home, because when we goes to his flat over the paper shop, after the fire was reported, Nev en’t there.’

‘What you saying?’ Gomer snapped a glance over his shoulder towards the pyramid of smoking debris, his fists clenching. Merrily saw that, behind the collapsed shed, a small building was still standing, probably because it was made of concrete blocks. In the distance, below the moon, she could see a conifered hillside, the view of which the aircraft shed must once have concealed.

‘What we want to ask you, Gomer,’ Cliff said, gently enough to make Merrily very worried, ‘is where might Nev’ve gone? A mate’s… a girlfriend’s?’

‘What you saying?’ Gomer turned slowly, the blue light flaring in his glasses. ‘What you bloody saying, Cliff Morgan?’

Some more people were gathering around, firemen with their helmets off, like a sign of respect. Gomer suddenly spun away and pushed through them, disappearing into a hollow of darkness beyond the milky confluence of vehicle lights.

Merrily found him standing outside the concrete building. The air smelled of oil and charred wood. She felt slightly sick. From behind, she heard Cliff saying wearily, ‘Don’t let the little bugger go in, for Christ’s sake.’

‘Lend me the torch, vicar.’

But it was only holding tight to the heavy, rubberized flashlight that kept Merrily’s hands from shaking. Drawing a long breath, she shone the light inside the building to where the water was still an inch deep, from the damping-down. And then the beam was all over the place as she pushed her sleeve into her face because of what the breath had brought in with it.

She started to cough again. Amid the diesel vapour and the wet wood-ash was an odour you could taste. The torch beam found its own way down scorched plasterboard walls, over a dented grey metal desk, a wooden chair that now looked like it was made of hollow columns of ash. The remains of a wooden partition hung in grotesquely ornate strands, like the rood screen in some abandoned church.

Biting down on her lip, Merrily shone the light back onto Gomer, standing there with his cap gone and his white hair springing up, an unlit roll-up between his teeth. As she watched, he seemed to sag, as if what she saw was just his clothes, and the living essence of Gomer was deflating inside them. She let the beam follow his gaze to what had been a mattress, reduced now to lumps of scorched fabric and exposed springs.

And Oh God. Oh, sweet Jesus. Like a prayer opening up.

Was that what she was supposed to do at this moment – offer up a prayer for what lay on the mattress, for the soul that had vacated the blistered, split skin, the flesh cooked in blue denim and left to congeal, the legs burned back to the bone, the feet fused into the Doc Martens by their melted rubber soles?

Merrily’s stomach lurched

Hands gripped her shoulders. Gomer was alive again and turning her around, snatching the torch from her, but even when she was away from the smell, standing in a puddle, letting the cold water seep into her shoes, she was still seeing the spindle of an arm thrown protectively across the swollen, football face so that all you could make out underneath was the grimace of teeth.

She heard Gomer saying hoarsely to Cliff, ‘You want that name? You want the name now, boy?’

5 Denial of the Obvious

IT WAS RAINING again, the moon hidden. Cliff Morgan said, ‘I know how hard this is, so if you’re not one hundred per cent certain then you should say so.’ His grey moustache covered most of his lips and his eyes suggested that he was more than ready for retirement. ‘And frankly, Gomer, I don’t see how you can be certain. I’m sorry. I think this is going to be a dentist job.’

He offered them shelter in the police car, holding open one of the back doors, but Gomer stood defiantly in the rain, rubbing hard at his glasses without taking them off. ‘You bloody write this down,’ he was insisting, as if he hadn’t heard anything Cliff had said to him. ‘You get it wrote down official, boy. I wannit in the report, black and white.’

‘I en’t writing anything down just now, Gomer. I think you’re very much in shock.’ Cliff looked at Merrily. ‘Mrs Watkins, right?’

She nodded. She didn’t think she’d seen him before, but he seemed to recognize her. Dyfed-Powys Police; maybe one of the cops involved in the Old Hindwell conflict last winter.

‘Gomer been with you all night, has he?’

Merrily was startled. ‘What’s that mean?’

‘I’m just pre-empting other people’s questions, Mrs Watkins. People who don’t know him as well as I know him.’

‘Right,’ she said. ‘Of course. Sorry.’ When a building on its own in the middle of the countryside got burned down at night, police inquiries were always going to start with the owner.

‘At this moment, it’s a suspicious death, Reverend. CID have been informed, the pathologist sent for, the scene-of-crime people. We don’t yet know whether we’ve got a crime, but procedures are stricter now. Infantrymen like us, we’re not allowed to touch anything any more. We’re not clever enough, see.’

‘All the same, you’ve obviously seen this… kind of thing before. Do you think… I mean, do you think he was dead before the fire?’ She swallowed; she was still feeling sick, was somehow still smelling that awful smell – like roast pork – as though grease and fumes were in her hair. She knew why Gomer didn’t want to come out of the rain.

The senior fireman said, ‘I would think… although he must’ve been close to the seat of the fire, I would say he was overcome with smoke before it got to him. I don’t think he would have suffered, if that’s what you’re asking.’ He turned to Gomer. ‘That mattress, Mr Parry – has that always been in the back room there?’

‘Ar.’ Gomer had his tin open and his fingers were at work on a new ciggy whether he knew it or not. ‘Boy used to sleep there sometimes when things was bad between him and Kayleigh.’

‘And sometimes not on his own, what I heard,’ Cliff said.

‘Mabbe. Her once locked him out best part of a week. Turned a blind eye, I did. He had enough problems back then. I never figured he was still kipping yere, mind. Mabbe there’d be nights when he’s walking into the ole flat, and it just comes down on him that her’d gone and left him for a biker and a bloody ole squat in Cornwall. And he just… he couldn’t stay there.’

Gomer stopped rolling the paper and tobacco, as if his fingers had gone numb, and he stared at the ground. Merrily wondered how often, since last January, he’d walked into his own bungalow and experienced that same cold dismay.

‘But if you was thinking…’ Gomer looked up at Cliff. ‘If you was thinking that mabbe Nev Parry come in yere tonight pissed out of his head, and set all this off by accident or bloody carelessness, you can forget it now, boy.’

‘Not my job to decide, Gomer.’

‘’Cause I’m giving you this other name now, and don’t you forget it.’

‘Gomer—’

‘Roddy Lodge,’ Gomer said. ‘Roddy Lodge, plant-hire cowboy from up by Ross. You go over there and you talk to that bastard about this. Now. Tonight. ’Fore he can wash the bloody oil off his clothes. Roddy Lodge. You write that down.’

Cliff wasn’t writing anything down. Another car was pulling in behind the police car and Gomer’s van. ‘CID, I do believe,’ the younger copper, Robbie, said. ‘Just in time for breakfast.’

Merrily put a hand over her mouth.

What you said to the bereaved, usually in hospitals, was something like, Would you like me to say a prayer? Would you like us to pray together?

It was not always appropriate.

Merrily drove Gomer’s van for three or four miles before pulling into a lay-by, a mile or so over the hill from Kington Cemetery. Overhanging trees were dripping on to the bonnet, an all-night bulb was glowing outside a cottage across the empty road. As she killed the engine, a barn owl glided low, almost at windscreen level, seemed almost to hover for moment.

‘Why’ve you stopped, vicar?’ It was the first time Gomer had asked a question since they’d left the yard. He’d sat stiff-backed in the passenger seat, staring through his glasses and the windscreen.

‘Ought to ring Jane,’ she said.

‘Her’ll be in bed.’

‘I don’t think so, Gomer, somehow.’

‘You gonner tell her?’

‘I think so.’

She fumbled for her phone. Nev: she hadn’t really known him. Yet she had.

No problem, vicar, I’ll get Nev to do it, see…

That bloody Nev… digged a whole trench, got called away, come back and filled it in and forgot he en’t put the bloody pipes down…

Daft bugger. Bloody sweatshirts. Never live it down. Gotter laugh, though. You gotter laugh…

Be meeting Nev on the site at eight – say this for the boy, no matter what he’s put away the night before, he en’t never late…

Probably because Nev would have been sleeping on the premises.

There was nobody for them to tell immediately about Nev. His mum and dad – Gomer’s elder brother and his wife – were both dead. His ex-wife, Kayleigh, was presumably still in a squat in Cornwall with a biker. And the police had advised Gomer not to inform anyone more peripheral until there was confirmation.

Dentist job.

The quizzing of Gomer by a dishevelled detective constable had been brief and routine; they’d want to talk to him again tomorrow when they knew more. This time he hadn’t mentioned Roddy Lodge, whoever he was… perhaps just a name thrown up by the shock, a convenient focus for Gomer’s uncomprehending anguish, his denial of the obvious.

Merrily called up the vicarage number and was starting to get anxious when it rang six times before Jane picked up.

‘Sorry.’ The kid sounded muzzy. ‘Think I kind of fell asleep in the chair.’ A pause. ‘It’s bad, isn’t it?’

Merrily told her most of it. No point in dressing it up. Jane was silent for a while, then she said, her voice pitched high and querulous, ‘Couldn’t it be like a tramp or something? I know that’s just as like— just as bad for somebody, but it…’

‘We have to wait for official confirmation, flower.’

‘I just like knew there’d be something like this. It’s that kind of year – anything that could possibly be bad is always worse. Starting with Minnie… What will you do now?’

‘Come home, I suppose.’

‘Mum…’ Another pause as the wider implications sank in. ‘This is going to screw him up completely, isn’t it? It’s not like he can revive that business on his own, not at his age. But if he doesn’t, he won’t know what to do with himself. He’ll just fade into—’

‘We won’t let that happen,’ Merrily said quickly. ‘Go to bed this time, flower, or you won’t be fit for school.’

‘It’s half-term.’

‘Of course it is.’

‘Holiday time,’ Jane said. ‘What fun.’

Merrily had been holding the phone tight to her ear and didn’t think Gomer had heard any of Jane’s side of the conversation at all. But when she pocketed the mobile and started the van’s engine, he turned to her, green dashboard lights reflected in his glasses. Whatever small amount of light was available, Gomer’s glasses always seemed to reflect it.

‘En’t gonner pack in, vicar. En’t gonner walk away.’

‘Never thought you would.’

‘Gotter put it all back together. Somehow.’

‘Yes.’

‘Kind of memorial would that be for the boy, the business went down the toilet?’

‘We should talk about that.’

‘Put me outer the picture,’ Gomer said. ‘It’s what he wanted.’

‘Who?’

‘Roddy Lodge.’

‘Well, we can talk about that, too.’ Merrily let out the clutch too quickly – the van lurched and the engine stalled. ‘When we’ve got clearer heads. When we’re not so—’

‘You’re bloody well fobbin’ me off, ennit?’

‘No, I’m not, but…’

‘Poor ole bloody Parry! Shock of it turned his mind, done his ole brain in! Won’t face up to the truth: the boy had a drink problem. Comes in out of his bloody head, sets light to the mattress. Always been a liability. Accident waitin’ to happen. That’s what they’re gonner say, ennit?’

‘No.’ Merrily restarted the engine. ‘No, they’re not. Everybody liked Nev. Everybody who knew him.’ Ar. Well, that’s true. That’s dead right. But it weren’t Nev he was after. Me he wanted to get at, see. Poor bloody Nev, he just got in the way.’

‘Gomer—’

‘Can’t back away from this, vicar. Gotter take my piece o’ the blame. I never thought, see. Even after what I yeard in the Swan tonight, I never thought anybody in his right mind would…’ He shook his head. ‘But he en’t, see. That’s the point. En’t in his right mind. I never really reckoned on that.’

It was something about his voice this time. And the realization that he must have been going over this, in a kind of mental mist, all the time she’d been talking at him. Merrily switched off the engine and then the lights, watching the green glow fade from Gomer’s bottle glasses.

She slid a hand under her hair, undid her dog collar, pulled it off and put it on top of the dashboard.

She lit a cigarette.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘Who’s Roddy Lodge?’

6 Demonizing Roddy

GOMER BORROWED MERRILY’S mobile and rang his home number. He wanted her to hear a message on his machine, which, if you didn’t use the skip signal, would relay everything recorded since you last wound back the tape. He sat there for about four minutes with the mobile at his ear before thrusting it back at her.

‘Listen…’

The moon was back in the sky, two of them back in Gomer’s glasses: animation.

Merrily listened.

‘Mr Parry, it’s Lisa Pawson. I’m back in London. Listen, I’m afraid I’ve had Lodge on the phone…’

Private drainage: for serious country-dwellers there was no other kind; you had a septic tank, and when the smell got too bad you had it emptied. For some incoming city types, however, having to take responsibility for your own waste could be a perpetual source of fear. What if it overflowed? What if it all started oozing back up your lavatory, in the middle of a dinner party?

It was the fear of sewage that kept firms like the Birmingham- based Efflapure in business. After meeting Lisa Pawson, Gomer had spent a couple of hours on Sunday evening making inquiries about the firm. Apparently, an Efflapure was an overpriced, overcomplicated, high-maintenance piece of junk that was supposed to turn your liquid waste into something you could safely add to your whisky. It would be smoothly and expensively installed for you by any one of a number of teams of so-called skilled subcontractors all over the country.

Mostly cowboys, Gomer said. Like Roddy Lodge, of down by Ross-on-Wye.

‘… And somehow, he knew you’d been to see me. It was awful. I really think he must be slightly off his head. He insists there’s absolutely nothing wrong with his positioning of the Efflapure and that you and the surveyor are “in it together”, trying to discredit him. Naturally, I don’t believe a word of this… but please will you call me as soon as you return.’

Bleep.

Merrily passed the phone back to Gomer. ‘How on earth did this Lodge know you’d been to see the woman?’

‘Somebody seen the van, sure t’be.’ Gomer put the mobile to his left ear and carried on listening to the sequence of messages. ‘No big surprise. It’s so near the main road, that place. Scores of motors going past, anybody could’ve seen me, even Roddy Lodge ’isself. Anyway, vicar, shouldn’t surprise you how fast word d’get around in this county.’

‘No. I suppose not.’

‘Also, see, there’s a lot o’ folk…’ His voice faded; she saw the moons beginning to shake in his glasses.

‘What’s wrong?’

Gomer handed her the mobile again. He took off his glasses, turned away.

‘… never woulder believed it, Gomer. Wanted one and a half mile of track clearin’, right up to the top of the Garth, and would we do it for two hundred? Bloody hell, I says, there’s at least five days’ work there, Mr Pugh!’

Nev.

‘I says he could argue it out with you, he wanted to. So if you hears from Frankie Pugh, that’s what it’s about, all right?’

Bleep.

Gomer coughed and looked out through the windscreen. Now that the sky had cleared again, you could see the lights of Eardisley village. Merrily put a hand on his arm. He’d become almost his old self, telling her about Efflapure and Roddy Lodge.

Now Mrs Pawson’s angsty voice was back in her ear.

‘… I’m sorry, this is getting ridiculous. He’s just phoned again. This time he says he doesn’t want any trouble and, while he isn’t admitting that it was wrongly positioned, he says he’s now prepared to come and take it away and return our money in full. In fact he… he was absolutely insisting that he should be the one to take it away. I’m sorry, one moment…’

Muted voices: Mrs Pawson in hurried conversation with someone in the room. Then she was back.

‘My husband agrees that no way should that man be allowed back on the premises, so I’m hoping that you’re going to be able to keep to the schedule and remove the… appliance tomorrow, as we arranged. I propose to telephone Lodge and tell him that you’ll be handling everything. If there’s a problem, please call me as soon as you can. Thank you, Mr Parry.’

Bleep.

Merrily lowered the phone. ‘Both these calls were this morning?’

‘Last one ’bout two this afternoon, I reckon,’ Gomer said. ‘No problem about lifting the unit. Me and Nev, we was gonner go over there first thing. But I still wanted to call her back, see. Some’ing puzzling me – why didn’t her take him up on this offer to shift the thing ’isself? Save ’em paying me to do it. Save me trying to flog it for ’em second-hand. Didn’t make no sense.’

‘Unless she wasn’t convinced Lodge would give them their money back.’

Gomer shook his head. ‘More’n that.’

‘What did she say when you called her back?’

‘Her wasn’t in. So after tea I gets on the phone to young Darren Booth – that’s the local surveyor called me in in the first place – and Darren… well, you ever met Darren, you’d know he’s terrible loud – rugby club, male-voice choir, that’s Darren. But today, the boy’s gone dead quiet on me. “Gomer,” he says, “my advice is, leave it a while. Let it lie. Likely her’ll change her mind, you know what these Londoners is like.” Now is that funny, or what, vicar?’

‘It’s odd.’

‘Ar. “What kind of ole wallop is this, Darren?” I says. He says, “He en’t right, that’s all.” ’

‘Lodge?’

‘ “En’t stable,” Darren says. “Very protective of his business,” he says. And wouldn’t say n’more. Comes on about how he has a hurgent appointment, rings off. Soon as I puts the phone down, it rings again. Voice goes, “Gomer Parry?” I says, “Ar, that’s me.” Voice says, “We don’t like the” – pardon my French, vicar – “we don’t like the fuckin’ Welsh… we don’t like the fuckin’ Welsh pinchin’ our business. You’re gettin’ a warnin’ tonight. You comes south of Hereford, you’re finished, Gomer Parry, you’re a dead man.” Then the line cuts off.’

‘That was him – Lodge?’

‘Held back his number, so I looks him up in the phone book, calls the number and nobody picks up. I reckon he wasn’t calling from home, see – that’s how it seems to me now. I reckon he was on a bloody mobile from down by my bloody depot, figuring out how he was gonner torch it. You’re gettin’ a warnin’ tonight – how much clearer you wannit?’

Merrily sighed. ‘If he was on a mobile, it might not be that easy to trace the call. And unless you have it on tape…’

‘Course, I din’t think that much about it – only made me more determined to do the job. Anyway, a bit later, I was gonner go to the parish meeting, thinking you might be in need of a spot of back-up, see, and I’m going across the square when Jumbo Humphries rolls up in his Caddy, says how about a quick one in the Swan, and I’m figuring if anybody know about Lodge it’ll be him, so—’

‘Jumbo?’

‘Humphries. Drives this ole Caddy?’

‘Ah.’ Merrily got out another cigarette. ‘I did notice this big, long American car on the square.’

‘That was him. Bloody ole thing that is, vicar – does about eleven miles a gallon on a long run. You en’t come across Jumbo? Got this place the other side o’ Talgarth – second-hand motors, stock fencing, animal feed, newspapers. And a snack bar. Harrods, they calls it.’

Merrily smiled and thumbed the Zippo, illuminating Gomer’s face. Seeing what might be small tear marks, she lit her cigarette quickly and put out the flame.

‘And also a private investigator,’ Gomer said.

‘You’re kidding.’

Gomer sniffed. ‘En’t that bloody brilliant, tell the truth, but he’s cheap. Checks out stuff for farmers, mostly. Stuff the NFU won’t do for free. Spyin’ on neighbours in feuds… land disputes, stock-thievin’. Goes around with a video camera. Mickey Mouse operation, you ask me, but Jumbo, he thinks he’s bloody Humphrey Bogart.’

‘Hang on, this is the man you were keeping pace with on drinks? You and he each drank four pints in the Swan and then he drove off in this huge, conspicuous American limo?’

‘Charmed life,’ Gomer said. ‘Plus he do weigh over twenty stone. Reckons it don’t affect him the same.’ He paused. ‘Come to think of it, he had a couple of whiskies as well. We had a good ole chat – catchin’ up, you know. And he told me a good bit about Lodge.’

‘Oh,’ Merrily said.

It was after midnight now and she was cold and tired. But Gomer was sounding increasingly focused and rational, and that was good. And if he needed to talk, well, women were good at listening – who said that? Never mind. Merrily smoked and listened.

It had been a rare case for Jumbo Humphries, the one that brought him up against Roddy Lodge. Probably routine for city private eyes, Gomer said, but rare for Jumbo: divorce.

What he’d previously failed to mention about Roddy was the boy’s legendary success with women. Gomer said he’d found this hard to believe: flash bastard, but not much to look at. Anyway, Jumbo Humphries had been retained by a farmer from down near Welsh Newton, who’d employed Roddy for field-drain work and come to regret it big time.

First off: tools, equipment. Things disappearing – a hay-fork, a stainless steel spade – whenever Roddy had been. Which he couldn’t believe at first, this farmer, as he knew the Lodge family: honest, straight, religious – Baptists. Couldn’t believe it was down to Roddy, this petty thieving, so he didn’t say anything.

And then, a couple of weeks after Lodge had finished the job and left, the farmer got word in the pub that his wife, who seemed to have made a lot of extra shopping trips lately, had been seen getting out of a white van in a lay-by where her own car was parked. When the shopping trips continued to increase, the farmer hired Jumbo Humphries to follow the wife.

Merrily found it hard to imagine how a twenty-stone man in a Cadillac was going to operate undercover in the vicinity of sparsely populated Welsh Newton, and this turned out to be a valid point. Although Jumbo Humphries had used one of the Land Rovers from his used-vehicle lot to follow the farmer’s wife one afternoon to a disused quarry, where a man was indeed waiting in a white van, he evidently had, at some stage, been spotted.

‘The van man – this is Lodge, right?’ Gomer said. ‘Jumbo recognizes him soon as he seen the dark glasses. So he parks out of sight – he thinks – on the edge of this quarry, gets out his video camera, starts creeping up on the van, figuring he might film ’em through the back window, get his evidence. Then…’

Gomer got out a roll-up, and Merrily lit it for him, noticing his hands were a long way from steady. He had two good drags before continuing.

‘Then just as he comes around the side o’ the van… bloody thing starts up, see. Spins round, comes after Jumbo – big empty space this is, the ole quarry yard – and Jumbo’s running for his bloody life. Van’s coming straight at him, near takes his foot off, and Jumbo, he stumbles and drops the camera. Van runs over it. Four hundred quids’ worth of camera!’

‘Occupational hazard, I suppose, for private eyes,’ Merrily said.

‘Not round these parts it en’t. But there was more to come, see. Lodge knowed Jumbo. Everybody does. He knowed where to find him, where he goes, where he drinks. That night, Jumbo comes out the pub at Llyswen, just on closing time, finds all four of the Caddy’s tyres slashed. Had to call a taxi to get home, come back with a low-loader next day to pick up the ole Caddy.’ He looked at Merrily expectantly. ‘See?’

‘Well… Gomer, it’s one thing running over a camera and slashing four tyres. I mean, it’s bad… But a major arson attack on a competitor’s yard involving… loss of life…’

‘Vicar, you yeard what that woman said on the phone. And Darren. And “You’re gettin’ a warnin’ tonight”.’

‘How did Jumbo know that it really was Lodge who slashed his tyres? Could’ve been pure coincidence, couldn’t it?’

Gomer snorted. ‘Put it together, vicar. Darren says he en’t stable. Somebody tells Lodge Gomer Parry Plant Hire’s been on his patch, Lodge goes straight round there and leans on Darren. Then he’s on the phone trying to put the frighteners on Mrs Pawson, only she’s in London…’

‘Didn’t Jumbo take it any further?’

‘Vicar, we en’t talkin’ about bloody Peter Marlowe yere. No, he didn’t take it no further. He backed off. What he says to me, he says, “Mess with Lodge, Gomer, you en’t dealin’ with a normal human being n’more.” ’

‘In what way?’

‘Mental, vicar. Lost it, blown it. Works on his own all night sometimes – been witnessed. Fires from the bloody hip when he feels threatened. And he en’t scared what he does. Feels he’s… nobody can touch him.’

‘Invulnerable.’

Ar. Met that type a few times.’

Gomer, you are that type, Merrily thought dismally.

‘ “You’re pushin’ seventy, Gomer,” Jumbo says, “and Roddy Lodge en’t even forty. Don’t be a bloody hero.” ’

‘That was tonight?’

‘In the Swan.’

‘Look…’ Merrily sensed his absolute certainty and turned to face him, an arm around the wheel. ‘I accept that the guy’s erratic, possibly a little unhinged. I realize you were right to tell the police, and I think you should tell them again tomorrow. I’ll tell them.’ She turned the key in the ignition. ‘Tomorrow, though. Let’s just… go home now.’

She let out the clutch and the van lurched into the empty road. Gomer was silent for a while. Merrily considered the possibility that, in his state of desolation, he was simply demonizing Roddy Lodge. What little evidence there was still pointed at poor Nev.

‘He knows they en’t there, see,’ Gomer said after a couple of minutes. ‘These Pawsons. Knows they en’t there ’cept weekends. Plus, he likely knowed we was coming to take out this Efflapure come the morning. Her said her was gonner tell him, right?’

‘Sorry… what are you getting at?’

‘Suppose he was plannin’ to go for that tank ’isself, meantime?’

‘Gomer, for… Why would he do that?’

‘Keep his good name, ennit? Small county, vicar. Man like that couldn’t live with folk knowin’ Gomer Parry Plant Hire had come and took away his fancy tank on account he’d put it in the wrong place and it weren’t needed anyway. Plus, also – I just figured this – we’d have one to look at, then, wouldn’t we? We’d all know what a piece of ole junk it was. Suppose he was makin’ sure we couldn’t do that job at all, by torchin’ the shed, destroyin’ the gear? Listen, I en’t sayin’ he knowed Nev was in there. I en’t sayin’ that… yet.’

‘Gomer, I know this has been a… an unimaginably awful thing to happen, but is that even vaguely—?’

‘Meanwhile he comes for the Efflapure ’isself under cover of dark, just to be sure. Knowing he got the place to ’isself…’

‘Is that entirely rational?’

‘He en’t a rational man, vicar. If he’s done the job tonight, if he’s been and took the Efflapure, that’s evidence.’

‘Possibly. If the Pawsons stick to their story.’

‘Don’t matter if they don’t, vicar, we got it on tape on the machine.’

‘Yes. I suppose you have.’ Merrily drove slowly into Eardisley, the first village on the black-and-white tourist trail which ended up eventually in Ledwardine. At night – all dark oak, whitewash and shadows – the village shed centuries and the car-dealer’s showroom right in the centre looked surreal.

‘Seventeen, mabbe eighteen,’ Gomer said. ‘No more’n twenty.’

‘What?’

‘Miles.’

Merrily sighed. ‘To this Pawson place, right?’

‘No traffic in Hereford, mind. Say half an hour, max?’

‘And what are we going to do if we find out he has taken the tank?’

‘Vicar, we’ll know.’ The two moons were clear and sharp in Gomer’s glasses. ‘We’ll bloody know.’

7 Legs Off Spiders

SO THIS WAS what they called The Hour of the Wolf. Something like that.

The dark night of the soul. The time of being transfixed by this acute, piercing awareness of the total pointlessness of everything – and of an utter, mindless, universal cruelty.

Jane had lain awake for nearly an hour, with Ethel the black cat on the bed beside her and real life hanging over her like this huge, leaden pendulum swinging slowly from side to side in the darkness.

You might as well just lie here for ever because, if you sat up at the wrong time, the lead weight – which you were never going to see coming – would suddenly smash you down again with sickening force.

This was what happened. This was the great, almighty secret of everything.

The moon – the once-beloved moon – made fitful appearances amid smoky cloud in the attic window, turning the coloured squares between the timber framing of the Mondrian walls into variations of grey. Everything was variations of grey.

Jane felt suddenly almost breathless with horror… with the thought that this – where her life was now – could actually be as good as it was ever going to get. Felt aglow inside with this bitter rage – the understanding that, as you got older and your body got weaker, the lead weight would smash you harder and more frequently until you couldn’t get up any more.

The way it was hammering Gomer Parry, who was one of the kindest, most actually decent people Jane had ever known, like a grandad to her now.

Because Gomer was getting old, and old people got ill and they got mugged – some universal law setting them up for this, the law that said: it’s always going to get worse. It was as if she’d never fully realized this painfully simple fact of life.

Made her mad as hell at Mum, this smart, still-attractive woman devoting most of her creative essence to the totally pointless adoration of something which, if it existed at all, existed only to treat us like shit!

Jane sprang up in bed, switching on the wall light, plucking the pay-as-you-talk from the bedside beanbag. She leaned back against the headboard, switching on the phone, punching out Eirion’s mobile number. OK, totally uncivilized time to ring anybody, especially the guy you were supposed to be in love in, but he’d have switched off his phone by now, so it wouldn’t matter; she’d just dump something into his voice-mail. Had to say something about this, and couldn’t call Mum without sounding like the little girl all alone in the big, dark vicarage.

‘Hello, Jane,’ Eirion said.

Oh sh—! She nearly stabbed the no button. ‘Jesus, Irene, I am so sorry – I don’t know what I’m doing. Like, why isn’t your phone switched off? It’s nearly one a.m.’ She reached up in a panic and snapped off the light, as though he could somehow see her with her hair all over the place and her eyes all puffy. ‘How did you know it was me?’

‘Because,’ Eirion said patiently, ‘of the solemn pact we made that we would always leave our phones switched on at night, so that if one of us was in crisis and needed to talk…’

Jane swallowed. ‘Oh.’

‘We remember now, do we?’

‘I didn’t think we meant it.’

‘Obviously one of us didn’t.’

She started to cry. ‘I’m sorry, Irene. I’m truly sorry. I’m the worst kind of bitch that ever—’

‘What’s wrong? You been listening to that Eels album again?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Jane said. ‘It was very stupid of me. I’ll call you tomorrow.’

‘Jane…’ Eirion’s soft Welsh voice sounded like it was weighted with all the sorrow of his ancestors. ‘If you hang up on me now, I may have to steal my stepmother’s BMW again and drive thirty miles to quench my overwhelming desire to strangle you very slowly.’

‘All right.’ Jane sniffed hard. ‘You asked for this, right? Big question: am I the only person of my age ever to realize that God, if God exists, is in fact some enormous, moronic, cosmic… infant who just, like, sits there, pulling the legs off spiders?’

Eirion thought about it for some time.

‘Probably not,’ he said.

Jane said, ‘Is there a longer answer?’

‘There undoubtedly has to be a longer answer, cariad, and probably a good reason why that concept is theologically unsound. Just don’t ask me what it is without giving me some kind of notice.’

‘And you’re really proposing to go to university next year?’

‘But not to read theology.’

‘Theology’s shit, anyway. I speak from insider knowledge.’

‘Jane, just tell me what’s wrong, could you do that? What’s happened?’

‘How do you know something’s happened?’

‘Because you didn’t ask me if I was naked.’

‘Right,’ Jane said.

‘That was a joke.’

‘I know.’

‘I’m not, anyway.’

‘Tonight, I don’t think I even care,’ Jane said.

And she told him why she was alone in the vicarage at one a.m.

It evidently knocked him back. He didn’t seem to know how to react. He knew Gomer; she couldn’t remember if he’d met Nev. ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Oh bloody hell, that’s… The poor guy. Shit.’

‘Like, consider, OK? Nev. Consider that this guy was just put here – this human being was created – to be a digger driver… to live in the same valley all his life… to become overweight… to have a very bad marriage, to… to get humiliated, get drunk… and then get fucking burned to death. That’s it! I mean, that’s it, Irene – The Nev Parry Story. The whole incarnation! What was that about? What was it supposed to teach him? How is it going to help refine his immortal soul? And like don’t give me any of that Welsh-chapel bollocks about redemption through endless suffering.’

‘I don’t know,’ Eirion said soberly. ‘Maybe it’s not something we’re permitted to understand.’

‘Yeah, great. Either that, or it’s all complete crap. How often do you think of that? I find I’m thinking it a lot now: no God, only chaos.’

‘You’re an emergent atheist suddenly? What happened to paganism?’

‘Yeah,’ Jane said. ‘Paganism. What did happen to paganism? You want the truth? Sometimes I’m inclined to think modern paganism’s purely and simply about having fun – a reaction to the grey, studied bloody misery of Christianity. Dressing up, casting spells, cobbling together phoney rituals that sound heavy and significant, and kidding yourself you have like exclusive access to some arcane inner knowledge, which… I mean, somehow, it all just like… dissolves in the face of real life, the fucking savagery of it.’ Jane rubbed a wet eye with the heel of her palm. She felt cold and barren, nothing left to cling to except… ‘I wish you were here, Irene.’

‘Well, me too, obviously. I’m coming over tomorrow anyway… later today, would that be? Knight’s Frome? The session?’

‘Oh yeah.’ Lol had finally fixed it with Prof Levin for Eirion, the all-time rock-obsessive, to sit in on a recording session. ‘I don’t even know about that now. I don’t know how things are going to turn out. Life just comes at you, doesn’t it, like an axe? I was just thinking – again – Is Mum Living a Lie? It often comes back to that.’

‘Why don’t you have a proper talk to her?’

‘There’s never time. If it’s not trivial parish crap it’s Deliverance stuff. And how valid is that, really? I used to worry that she was in genuine spiritual danger from the unseen world… But how much crap is that? How often does the bloody unseen world destroy your—’

‘Jane, is this the time to talk about this stuff? I don’t think so.’

‘Au contraire, Irene, it’s the time when you can see the reality of it in all its stark… reality.’

‘What about your psychic experiences? You were always going on about that stuff.’

‘I think… I think we fool ourselves half the time. We desperately want there to be something else, and our subconscious minds, our brains, help us out. Comfort chemicals.’ For a moment she was shocked at the hard, croaky sound of her own voice. ‘And she… like Mum always says, when everything else fails, you just have to believe in love.’ Jane stared into the darkness. ‘I don’t know whether that’s a smart answer or just a smart get-out.’

She was thinking, What if love’s also a lie? What if there’s only sex, to take your mind off the shit for a few minutes?

‘I’d better go,’ she said.

‘Mabbe this was a mistake,’ Gomer said as they followed the A49, a couple of miles out of Hereford, hitting the open countryside again south of Belmont. ‘You needs your sleep, vicar, all these buggers in the parish trying to stab you in the back.’

‘Parish politics, I’m afraid,’ Merrily murmured, ‘are what people do when life isn’t happening to them.’

‘I gotter be up early, too, mind,’ Gomer said. ‘See about hiring some machines for a week or two. Got a mini-digger at the bungalow, but he en’t gonner handle much.’

She slowed. ‘Oh, Gomer.’

Got clients. They en’t gonner wait around.’

‘Gomer, that’s not – excuse me – entirely sane.’

‘Nev would want it.’ He sounded like he was somewhere else: Planet Plant Hire. ‘Twenty-four-hour service, see.’

Merrily flicked him a sideways glance. ‘If you even attempt to work this week, I’m going to have you sectioned.’

‘Wouldn’t work, girl. Buggers’d only put me in the care of the community, then you’d get me back.’ He paused. ‘You knows me by now, vicar – I don’t get back to work, it’ll all come down on me.’

She was silent. It was true. If he didn’t keep on, in the face of everything, he’d turn into some kind of elderly person, and not the most contented kind. This was why they were here now, heading towards Ross-on-Wye through the squally night. Nothing to do with obtaining evidence, because there wasn’t going to be any. This was about Gomer Parry never giving in.

‘Right.’ He was on the edge of his seat. ‘Not far now, vicar. We oughter stop some way off, pull off the road like we broke down. Don’t wanner look conspicuous, see.’

The traffic was mainly long-distance container stuff, widely separated. Merrily settled in behind a tall van with a sign on the back that read How’s my driving?, with a phone number. If there’d been one on the back of Gomer’s van tonight, the line would be jammed.

‘OK, slow down now… by yere.’ He tapped the wheel, and she took the van over the kerb and onto the grass verge, braking hard when high bushes loomed, skidding on a mud path. ‘That’s all right, girl. Shove him tight into them bushes. I’ll get out your side.’

Merrily switched off the lights and the engine, and climbed out onto the wet verge, looking around. She ought to have known where this was, but it was different at night: a stretch of tarmac, no houses visible. On the other side, the moon revealed what looked like endless fields, just a few tiny lights in the far distance. On the nearside, a ragged line of unbarbered bushes followed the road around a left-hand bend maybe a hundred yards ahead.

Gomer joined her. ‘Got the—?’

‘Torch, yes. Where’s the house?’

‘Just around that next bend.’ Gomer looked back along the verge, pointing. ‘See that wood – he runs along the back.’ But he made no move to go that way, as if he’d finally accepted the futility of all this, realized he’d clutched at the idea of Roddy Lodge as saboteur simply because he couldn’t face going home to an empty house, a cold bed and an answering machine with Nev’s voice on it.

‘I expect you’d be able to tell straight away if by any chance Lodge had moved this thing,’ Merrily said.

‘Sure to,’ Gomer said dully.

‘Let’s do it, then.’ She moved along the verge, the hem of her alb getting soaked in the long grass. ‘If anybody sees us, we can say the van broke down and we’re trying to find a phone.’

When they rounded the bend, the road began to dip and the house was below them, a block of shadow. It was no more than twenty feet back from the road and looked even closer because of its comparative isolation. Living here, you’d hear the traffic all night, a restless lullaby.

‘Entrance is just past the house itself, up a little drive,’ Gomer whispered. ‘All the land’s the other side, see.’

‘And that’s where the… thing is?’

‘The Hefflapure.’ He stopped and looked back at her, shaking his head as if he was just waking up. ‘Bloody daft, this, ennit?’

‘Something you had to do, that’s all,’ Merrily said.

‘Naw, just an ole man lookin’ for a… what’s the word?’

Scapegoat? ‘Can’t think,’ Merrily said. ‘Look, tonight we… you’ve seen what no relative should ever have to see. Maybe… I dunno… maybe we both needed to drive around a bit.’

‘Ar.’ Gomer stood at the edge of the A49, squeezing his fingers together. He seemed to have left his ciggy tin in the van. Merrily pulled out her Silk Cut, offered him one. Gomer shook his head.

‘People thought he must be called Neville. Used to get letters addressed to Mr Neville Parry.’ I thought that, too. What was he called?’

‘Nevin. Seaside place in North Wales, where his folks used to go on their holidays. Likely he was conceived there.’

Merrily smiled, and they both stepped back onto the grass as a high-sided touring coach swished past towards Ross, probably empty except for the driver. Its passenger windows, only feebly lit, were reflected, fragmented, in the leaded upper windows of the Pawson house.

But its dipped headlights set up more of a glare in Gomer’s glasses. And in the dusty back windscreen of the big digger in the drive.

All the breath came out of Gomer in a rush and Merrily actually went cold with shock.

The digger sat there silently, unoccupied, its shovel half- raised in front.

‘It’s him,’ Gomer said drably, after a moment. ‘Lodge. He’s bloody well yere.’

8 Nil Odour

AFTER A MOMENT, Merrily felt calmer. When she’d first seen the JCB in the drive it had been like the instant when a dream turned malignant, when your subconscious mind presented you, unexpectedly, with an image so loaded with menace, within the logic of the dream, that it jerked you awake for reasons of mental self-preservation. And then you thought, surprised at yourself, For heaven’s sake, it was just a truck.

‘Gomer,’ she said, ‘let’s just… let’s think about this.’

But Gomer was already off – the way he’d reacted back at the depot when he’d realized the savage truth behind Cliff Morgan’s gentle probing about Nev’s whereabouts. Only now he had a real, solid target; he was a man with something to prove, something tangible within his grasp. Before she could think to stop him, he was in through the gateway, urgently pushing back shrubs and squeezing around the side of the digger and under its wide front shovel.

Which was as far as he got, because that was when the nightmare came out of remission.

Merrily must have seen it first – a movement from the blackness between the drive and the house, and it made her jump, but she didn’t cry out because it could have been a cat or an owl. And then she saw Gomer come skating backwards, bumping along the side of the digger, bushes ripping at his jacket.

Gomer!’ He crashed back into a timber gatepost. She rushed to him. He was still on his feet but wheezing. ‘Gomer, Christ, are you—’

And then there was another man’s voice uncoiling from the shadows.

‘You want some more? You want some more, matey, you come right back now, look, and touch my digger again.’

Merrily gripped Gomer’s arm, steadying him. ‘He hit you?’

‘Pushed me, was all. Caught me off guard, ennit? Can you… can you find my glasses, vicar? Somewhere just yere.’

Merrily crouched, fingers scrabbling in the gravel, but her gaze was fixed all the time on the narrow alley between the digger and the shrubs at the edge of the drive, made wider by Gomer’s hurtling body. She found she was screwing up her eyes, expecting some sudden harsh light to hit them, but there was none. She could see the uneven roof-line of the house and the moving white dot of a plane between clouds.

She was about to switch on their own torch, then changed her mind because…

Because, oh Jesus, because maybe it was better kept as a weapon. She tightened her grip on the rubber stem of the torch, still patting the gravel with her other hand, while trying to rationalize this, trying to think of any possible explanation other than that Gomer’s crazy theory about Roddy Lodge had been, for heaven’s sake, dead right.

The only other explanations involved coincidence. One coincidence too many.

In the gravel, she touched smoothness and a wire earpiece and, in the same moment, saw a man standing at the end of the drive, between the tailgate and the house, moonlight glinting on the creases of his jacket: leather. He stood in silence, not moving, then he called out.

‘What you at over there?’

Merrily stood up, thrusting Gomer’s glasses into his hands. ‘OK, that’s it. This is where we leave. We’ve seen the digger, we know he’s here. Let’s go.’

‘We can call the police.’

‘Can’t do that, vicar.’ Gomer pushed his glasses on, calmly curling the wires around his ears. ‘Can’t just walk off now.’

‘No good. Buggers en’t gonner believe us. Anyway, time they gets yere, if they comes at all, he’ll be long gone. We got this bastard cold right yere, now… two of us… witnesses.’

‘Gomer—’

‘Chicken, then, is it?’ the man enquired, no hint of fear in the voice, although the words were spoken rapidly. ‘You boys chickenshit?’

Merrily whispered, ‘Let it go. Let’s just go back to the van. You’re right, we’re witnesses. It’s all we need. I promise you, Gomer, I’ll back you up all the way, but we need to—’

Gomer straightened up, bawled out, ‘You wanner know who I am, is it?’

‘No!’ Merrily dragged on his arm. Gomer didn’t move, felt as firmly rooted as the gatepost. She let go with a sound she realized was a sob, as he started to shout.

‘WHO AM I? GOMER PARRY PLANT HIRE! THAT’S WHO I AM, YOU MURDERING BASTARD!’

Silence. Merrily closed her eyes, squeezing the torch with both hands. Please, God, get us out of this. She could hear another lorry grinding round the bend in the A49 and considered running out into the road, waving her arms to flag down the driver.

‘Well, well, well,’ the man said.

Gomer stepped away from Merrily. Stood there with his arms by his side. Little soldier, little gunfighter. Merrily shook her head. No.

‘Lodge!’

‘Who says?’

‘What you done with that JCB, Lodge?’

‘En’t your business.’ The voice higher now, like a fox barking in the night.

‘It’s that bloody tank, ennit? You took him out.’

Pause. The lorry rumbled away on the road to Ross.

What tank’s that, then, Mr Gomer Parry?’

‘The bloody Hefflapure.’

‘Oh, you heard o’ that, then?’ Pause. ‘Thought they was still digging cesspits where you come from. Carryin’ it out in buckets.’

Gomer took a breath. There might be method in this madness, but Merrily didn’t think so. A duel: plant-hire rules? And then she thought, What if he isn’t on his own? How could he move that thing without help? What if he’s keeping us talking while someone else… ?

She whirled round. The entrance gaped.

‘You better ’ave a good explanation of where you was tonight, Lodge,’ Gomer said. ‘You better’ve got some good witnesses.’

A moment’s silence.

‘What you on about, little man?’

‘You know bloody—’

‘’Cause I don’t reckon you knows what the fuck you’re talkin’ about any more, Mr Gomer Parry. I don’t reckon you knows nothin’ ’bout nothin’, ole man. Well bloody past it. Clingin’ on by your bloody old arthriticky fingertips. Oughter’ve packed in while you was ahead, look, but you couldn’t let go… else you was just doin’ it to keep away from your ole woman.’

‘You bas—’

‘You don’t bloody know—’ Then Roddy Lodge just erupted. ‘Shit! You don’t know shit!’ Laughter like flames in the night. ‘This yere tank, he en’t no business o’ yours. This is my digger, my fuckin’ tank. I put him in, I took him out. No business o’ yours. Never was your business. You en’t got no business, boy. You en’t got business worth shit, every fucker knows that, knows I’m Number One now, look, I got fuckin’ respect for miles round yere… done tanks for all the nobs all over the Three Counties and down into Wales. I done Prince Charles’s fuckin’ sewage over at Highgrove!’

Gomer shook. ‘You lyin’ bloody toad!’

‘I done Madonna’s fuckin’ sewage up in the Cotswolds! I done Sting’s shit, down in Wiltshire!’

In other circumstances, Merrily thought, this could have been funny – surreal, anyway. ‘Gomer,’ she whispered urgently, ‘listen to me, you were right, he’s not rational. Let’s get the hell out.’

‘You go fetch the van then, girl. I’ll keep him—’

‘You bloody well won’t! You can come with me now.’

‘Who’s that with you, Gomer? Darren Booth?’ Merrily could see Roddy Lodge’s silhouette, almost full-length now, in the alley between the JCB and the hedge. Bizarrely, Lodge seemed to be bouncing on his toes. ‘Come on out, then, Darren – take you both on. Come on out… come on, boys!’

He sprang into the middle of the drive and started shouting again – voice high and rapid and streaked with outrage. ‘Tried to pinch my business. Tried to blacken my good name. Tellin’ porky pies about me! Come on, boys. Take you both… Her din’t believe you, look. Her knows what I give her was good. Knows I’m Number fuckin’ One, and don’t you ever forget it, Mr Gomer fuckin’ Chickenshit—’ Roddy Lodge broke off, looked up, squinting. ‘En’t Darren, is it?’

Gomer said nothing.

‘If it en’t Darren, who is it? I bet it’s only that fuckin’ fat mental-defective you got workin’ for you.’

Merrily could almost see herself, as if in a film, slow-motion, making a lunge for Gomer and Gomer not being there – Gomer moving away from her, along the side of the JCB, thin branches whipping behind him, until he and Roddy Lodge were facing each other in the open.

‘You murdering bastard!’

No, no, no… Merrily started edging around the other side of the digger. It was a tighter squeeze and it brought her up against the half-raised shovel, about six feet wide, with a piece of tarpaulin hanging over the rim. Please God…

‘Meaning what?’ Roddy Lodge said, and she could see his lean body and then his face: concave, with a jutting, pointed jaw, pointed nose, eyes that slanted slightly. A puppet kind of face, she thought.

And he was tense now; this was clear even in vague moonlight. A sheen of sweat on his face. He’d run out of banter and mockery. He was nervous.

Because he did it, she thought. He did it. She could hardly breathe. Roddy Lodge and Gomer were standing only feet apart, on a paved forecourt in front of the house. If Lodge made a move on Gomer, took one step, she would have to go for him with the torch.

She started to tremble.

‘You set fire to my yard,’ Gomer said.

‘Never!’

‘You set light to my place tonight, boy. And my nephew, he was in there. I dunno whether you knowed that, but it don’t matter… he still bloody died.’

Roddy Lodge stood there, taking this in. She couldn’t make out his expression. She raised the torch, ready to run out.

‘And that’s murder,’ Gomer said.

Roddy Lodge didn’t move but something did – maybe a cloud, because now his face was washed by pallid light, and she could see he was smiling. It was this big, loose smile, causing his jaw to drop, as though all the tension in him was evaporating in the moonlight.

Lodge said easily, ‘You know what, Parry? You’re fuckin’ mad, you are. You’re fuckin’ out of it.’

‘It was murder,’ Gomer said.

‘Whatever you say, matey.’ Lodge’s voice was quieter now.

‘You en’t denying it. You en’t even—’

‘I en’t even talkin’ to you n’more, ole man. You’re senile. Fuck off home, I would, while you can still walk.’

Lodge began to move towards Gomer, not hurrying but not delaying either, and whatever he could see now in Gomer’s face, it was making the smile on his own grow bigger and whiter. The torch felt sweaty in Merrily’s hand as she squeezed past the digger, along the rim of its front shovel, trying to transfer the flashlight to her other hand… feeling it slip out of her grasp and down into the shovel. She expected a clang, but it landed on something soft: the tarpaulin. She leaned over, reaching down into the metal maw, grabbed for the torch, stumbled, clutching at the tarpaulin, dragging some of it back, releasing a curling, piercing, pungent sweet aroma… and her scream.

And she watched Roddy spinning round with all the inevitability of slow motion.

‘Who’s that? Who is it?’

Merrily pushed herself away from the shovel and staggered out into the forecourt, shaking hard, feeling sick.

Roddy Lodge walked towards her across the moon-stroked flagstones. Her stomach was turning over.

He wore a grey leather jacket, tight leather jeans and cowboy boots, everything covered with drying red mud.

‘A woman?’ His voice rose to a note of wonderment.

‘You leave her alone!’

Merrily saw Gomer Parry about five yards away, both arms down by his side, fists tight, glasses opaque. Gomer’s voice was weaker now, could have been coming from half a mile away. She was willing him not to move, and all the time her mind was scrabbling for purchase on a sheer cliff-face of solid ice. It can’t be.

When Roddy Lodge came up to her, the first thing she noticed was his aftershave. He must have put it on with a paste brush. She almost retched.

‘Nice one, too, en’t you?’ Roddy was examining her, as if she was something that had just been delivered to his door. ‘Very nice. What you doing with the likes of this little toe-rag, my darlin’?’

The aftershave was so pungent it made her think of Nil Odour, the fluid undertakers used in coffins – the stuff the nurses at the General had kept under the bed of Denzil Joy, whose stench still sometimes soaked through her sleep.

Flash image: the half-cooked corpse of Nevin Parry. She felt faint with nausea.

Can’t be. Can’t be. Not again.

Automatically, her mind was erecting a segment of St Patrick’s Breastplate:

I bind unto myself the Name

The strong Name of the Trinity…

‘I’m very sorry about this,’ Merrily said calmly. ‘I’m really sorry, Mr Lodge.’

He had his head on one side, peering down at her. His eyes were aglow. He had a luminous white smile. She sensed a lot of energy there and even some humour. She sensed him wanting to touch her. She didn’t move away. Her coat had come open over her chest. She was expecting him to become aware of her dog collar, then realized she’d taken it off in the van.

She took a breath. ‘Mr Lodge, my name’s Merrily… The Reverend Merrily Watkins. I’m Gomer’s parish priest. I’ve been with him all night, since we first heard about the fire.’ She paused. ‘Mr Lodge, I’m sure you can imagine what kind of effect all this has had on Gomer. His nephew dead, everything destroyed.’

‘Why’s he reckon it was me?’ Roddy Lodge said.

‘Look…’ Her voice felt warm and soothing, full of pulpit- projection. ‘That’s what I’ve been trying to tell him. The police… the police said Nev had been drinking heavily, and they think he probably started the fire himself, accidentally.’

She didn’t look at Gomer, but she could feel it setting around him: a shabby concrete overcoat of bafflement and betrayal. She lowered her voice.

‘He’s an old man, Mr Lodge. He’s lost everything. When he wanted me to drive him here, I… I didn’t know anything about this… whatever history there is between you and him. I just assumed this place… that it held some memories for him and Nev, or something. I don’t know what he’s got against you or why it’s come up now, but I’m really sorry.’

‘Turned his mind, is it?’ Roddy said.

‘I’m sure he’ll come through this, with help. I’m just… I mean, I hope you’re not going to go to the police or anything. I promise you I’ll talk to him.’

‘Come and talk to me, you want, sweetheart.’ Roddy grinned. It was a wide engaging grin, but separate from his eyes, which seemed to have their own staccato light, like the sparks from her Zippo. ‘Vicar, eh? I goes and talks to our vicar sometimes. Nice feller.’ He unzipped a breast pocket of his leather jacket. ‘En’t as sexy as you, though. I reckon he’s a bit scared of me, tell the truth.’ He laughed, a high barking. ‘I scared him, I did. I scared the ole vicar.’

‘Did you?’

‘Told him ’bout all the things I seen in the night. Spooky!’

‘Sounds… interesting.’

‘Well, then…’ Merrily didn’t move as Roddy pulled out a card and came right up to her. ‘You come and talk to me any time you want. Any time. And anything you want doing, I’m your man. Special rates for the Church, look.’

He inspected her face, as though he was committing it, feature by feature, to memory.

‘Thanks.’ She took the card. ‘I’d like that.’

‘Yeah,’ Roddy said. ‘You would indeed, my darlin’.’

Merrily walked away without once looking back, Gomer following behind like a beaten old dog. She didn’t look at him, either.

She walked along the side of the big yellow digger without glancing at it or breathing in, walked out of the gateway and along the verge of the A49, with the long grass wet and cold around her ankles, sensing that Roddy Lodge was watching them and so not hurrying, not giving in to the urge to run, to the pushing in her chest. She walked around the bend in the road to where the van was almost embedded in the hedgerow. She unlocked the van and opened the door wide, so that Gomer could climb across to the passenger seat, where he sat in silence, sagging, as if all the life-energy had been vacuum-pumped out of him. She got into the van and turned the key in the ignition and for a moment was afraid it wasn’t going to start, but the engine caught on the second turn and she waited until there were no headlights in view before carefully reversing the van out onto the road. She drove for a mile or so in the direction of Ross before pulling off the road into the car park of a darkened pub. She switched off the engine but left the headlights on, illuminating a hanging sign featuring a rabbit or a hare, with a fluffy tail, seen from behind.

Merrily needed light. She needed to see anything coming. She tossed her head back over the peeling vinyl of the driving seat and let the breath out of her mouth, and when it came out it was an enormous sob, her body slumping into shudders.

‘Vicar?’

She held the wheel as if she was never going to let it go. ‘Couldn’t you smell it?’

He didn’t reply. He didn’t understand.

Merrily pulled herself up and found her phone. She couldn’t remember the number of Hereford Police. She’d have to ring 999 and see if they could put her through to anyone in CID.

‘I stum— stumbled, Gomer. Grabbed hold of this tarpaulin in the shovel of the digger, and it came away.’ She switched on the phone and turned to look at him. ‘I know… I know the smell now, you see. From when we found Barbara Buckingham. You remember. No mistaking it ever again, is there?’

Gomer lurched to the edge of his seat. ‘In the shovel?’

‘Thought I was hallucinating at first. Thought it was the shock… you know, of seeing Nev and… But it wasn’t the same. This one was putrid. State of decay.’

Merrily stabbed 9 three times. Later she would have to call Jane and explain why she might not be home until dawn, or later.