The Lamp of the Wicked

32 Ariconium

THE DOORS OF Roddy Lodge’s garage were painted dark green. Somebody had been at one of them with chalk. The message read:

Put him down a cesspit where he belongs

Merrily pulled into the verge just short of the village and took off her dog collar. No point in asking for confrontation on the street, though she might put it back on before meeting the Development Committee at ten.

When she went into the Post Office and Stores to buy some cigarettes and a paper, the fat man behind the counter asked if she was a reporter.

‘Pity,’ he said. ‘We want all the publicity we can get. We ain’t rolling over for this one, no way.’

London accent. Who did he mean by ‘we’?

She glanced at the paper rack. The story hadn’t made the front pages of the tabloids, but she glimpsed the name Fred West in a single-column headline halfway down the Daily Telegraph. She took the paper to the counter and said casually, ‘Why are people so worked up about this man being buried here? He’s local, isn’t he, whatever he’s done.’

‘So was Melanie Pullman,’ the fat man explained.

‘And how would you feel’ – a fiftyish woman in a yellow PVC jacket detached herself from a carousel of tights – ‘if your sister was lying under some cold field you didn’t even know where, and a man who called himself Satan gets a Christian burial?’ Birmingham accent this time: how would yow feel?

‘No way,’ the fat man said. ‘No way. They should get him cremated on the quiet. Do what they like wiv the ashes, long as nobody knows. You got a situation where this place is finally getting on its feet at long last. Do we want connecting wiv a sicko? No way.’

‘You only got to look at this female priest.’ The woman was looking at Merrily without recognition. ‘We all know what that’s about. That’s the woman who got herself made exorcist. Making a big thing out of it. Anything to make a name for yourself these days. Publicity mad.’

Merrily nodded. ‘So I’ve heard.’ She folded up the Telegraph.

On her way out, she heard the man say, ‘Exorcist? What’s that about, then?’

‘Making sure he don’t come back, Richard.’

‘Dump him somewhere else, and it ain’t a bloody problem!’

Laughter. Put him down a cesspit. Shove the fame-hungry bimbo priest in after him. Bitch.

But these two were both incomers. There had to be some sympathy for Tony Lodge and Cherry among indigenous villagers. Must be people here who’d known Roddy for years, drunk in the pubs with Roddy, been to school with Roddy, played on the hillside with him, nursed him as a baby – this poor kid with no mother in a house full of taciturn men. The poor kid who turned into a murderer. Who tomorrow gets buried – darkly, quietly, before his time.

You didn’t have to be here long to understand why the undertakers wanted to switch dates.

Merrily took the newspaper back to the car on the main street of Underhowle: exposed at last in fog-free, rain-free daylight. She’d left the Volvo where the road shuffled uphill by the primary school and the new village hall that had once been a barn. The school was utility Victorian Gothic; she hadn’t even noticed it in the dark when she’d walked up with Bliss and the locals, but now there were lights on inside and the windows were lurid with finger-painting and the severity of the main building was mocked by the yellow panels of a mobile classroom in the yard.

It was coming up to nine-fifteen. There might just be time, before the meeting with the Development Committee, to check out the church and the Lodge family graves. Lay him to rest before anyone sees. Bury him with dignity, if you must, but essentially with speed, because…

Oh God – Lol’s gig! It was Lol’s gig tomorrow night. There’d just be time to get home, get changed, get up to Hereford…

She leaned against the car. Behind the school, the village was crumbling down the hillside, in all the dull multicolours of broken dog biscuits. Close to the centre was the rusty-brown bell tower of the church and the green areas between graves; on the outskirts the blue smoked-glass roof lights of the computer factory fitted into the gap between two small housing estates: one in pink brick, one rendered a drab, sub-Cotswold ochre.

And bestriding all, like the watchtowers of a concentration camp against the forest and the sky, the lines of pylons.

One of them a killer. Why should anyone worry about a single stone marking the spot where Roddy’s body lay when you had only to look up to see the massive instrument of his execution, the real Lodge Memorial, sculpted in grey steel?

It stood defiant, gleeful as a guillotine. But right now nobody else seemed to be looking up. The initial trauma was over and the community was functioning again – happening on the ground in the unforced way it never seemed to in perfect, pickled Ledwardine. Underhowle in motion: vehicles drawing up and moving off, from Land Rovers to a vintage American car with tail fins, people slipping in and out of the few shops with shouts of greeting, hands raised. Soft lights coming on in a unisex hairdressers’ called Head Office.

Finally getting on its feet. How many ways had she heard that expressed? Prospered more in the past five years than in the previous forty. And they make it all sound so exciting for the future.

Well, good luck to them. Merrily got into the Volvo, opened out the paper on the passenger seat and found that the story was straightforward and more restrained than she’d expected.

FRED WEST LINK IN BORDER MURDER INQUIRY

by Eric Birchall

Crime Correspondent

THE SELF-CONFESSED ‘serial killer’ Roderick Lodge, who was electrocuted after climbing a pylon to escape from police, had an obsession with the mass-murderer Fred West, detectives said last night.

An extensive collection of news cuttings about the West killings has been found hidden at Lodge’s Herefordshire home, along with what West Mercia CID describes as

‘substantial evidence that he saw Fred West as a role model’.

West, 53, hanged himself in his cell in 1995, while awaiting trial for the murder of twelve young women and girls, many of whom were found buried in the cellar and garden of his house at 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester – 15 miles from Lodge’s home in the village of Underhowle, near Ross-on-Wye.

Lodge’s only confirmed victim, Lynsey Davies, a 39-year-old mother of four, was buried under one of the septic tanks he installed over a wide area of Herefordshire, Gloucestershire and Monmouthshire. But police have not ruled out the possibility that he may have murdered at least two other women.

‘Without bodies, we can’t establish how much of this was sick fantasy,’ said Det. Ch. Supt. Luke Fleming, who is leading the inquiry.

‘Lodge operated over a very wide area, using heavy plant equipment. We’ve been able to trace many of his recent customers but it’s clear that not all of them were recorded in his accounts, and we’d like to talk to anyone who has employed him in the last five years or so.

‘I would stress that this man was a known fantasist, with possible psychiatric problems, and the last thing we want is to create any kind of unnecessary panic.

‘Lynsey Davies was Lodge’s girl-friend and it is quite possible that what we are looking at is a one-off domestic murder by an inadequate who liked to identify himself with the most notorious mass murderer of recent years, who happened to have lived and committed his murders in a neighbouring area.’

Meanwhile, a row has broken out in Underhowle village, where many residents are objecting to Lodge being buried in the local churchyard.

They say his grave would become ‘a sick tourist

attraction’, especially if more bodies are unearthed.

The local rector, the Rev. Jerome Banks, has declined to conduct the funeral service. The Diocese of Hereford said a priest from outside the area would be taking it over.

Taking it over. Oh yes, in the capable hands of the Deliverance Consultant what could possibly go wrong? Merrily leaned back in the driving seat, wearily closing her eyes and glimpsing Jane at her most sullen at the breakfast table this morning before leaving for school with hardly a word, and Merrily too droopy with insufficient sleep to make a thing of it.

A tapping on the window made her jerk back, crumpling the Daily Telegraph against the wheel.

The face sideways at the glass was a long face, with a wide mouth, springy yellow hair.

Fergus Young, head teacher and chair of the Development Committee.

Merrily wound down the window.

‘Tough night, detective constable?’ Fergus Young said.

What Merrily noticed first was all the red computers, pushing out everywhere, like the heads of wild poppies. She was wondering where she’d seen one before and then realized.

‘Roddy Lodge’s office. Roddy Lodge had one of these.’

‘No surprise in that,’ Fergus Young said in his deep, easy voice. ‘Most households in the village have one now. Not only small children use them but also elderly people who’d never imagined they could operate a computer. And, yes, people like Roddy, I suppose, for the same reason.’

He showed her into his office, a little friendlier now, his long, bony features more relaxed. When she’d felt forced to re-identify herself, he’d closed up, visibly pondering the earlier deception – why had Bliss had introduced her as a colleague? Fergus didn’t get the joke, and why should he?

But, OK, if she was already being widely condemned as some self-publicizing clerical bimbo, she was going to sit this one out, very quietly.

There were two more computers in the headmaster’s high- ceilinged office, another red one and a more conventional model. It was central government’s declared aim, Fergus had told her, to provide one computer for every secondary school student in Britain. The primary kids here had two each, one at school, one at home.

There was a knock on the door and a boy of about eight stuck his head round it. ‘Would you and your visitor like some coffee, Fergus?’

‘Thanks, Barney, I think we probably would. And if you see Chris and Piers Connor-Crewe, send them through, would you, mate?’

The kid nodded, vanished. Merrily raised an eyebrow. ‘First- name terms?’

‘It kind of phased itself in.’ Fergus motioned Merrily to a green leather sofa under the window and settled himself on the arm at the other end. He was wearing jeans and a yellow tracksuit top. ‘Some of them were getting so enthusiastic I realized they were beginning to see us as friends.’

‘And is that, erm, good for discipline?’

Fergus tossed his stallion head. ‘Surprisingly so. After a while you find that most of the actual disciplining of antisocial elements is handled by their peers. They’re inclined to take a harder line with disruptive behaviour than the staff ever would. Disruptive behaviour being anything that gets between them and what they’re trying to achieve.’

‘You mean between them and having fun.’

‘Well, sure, having fun is how they see it at first. But by the time they get to nine or ten, it’s serious. I mean, we’re not regarded as teachers, we’re advisers… enablers. They want to know something, we’re here to help them. It’s simply a question of awakening that desire to learn, and that usually happens before they start school. If we put a computer into every home as soon as a child can walk, then another child, a bit older, shows the youngster how to operate it. And by the time they’re four, they can’t wait to get here to meet the people they’ve already seen on screen.’

‘Blimey,’ Merrily said. ‘How do you afford it?’

‘Chris – Chris Cody? – he’s been very good, starting us off. Which, of course, is paying off for him now, in orders from all over the country. Word of mouth so far, and I’ve got a book on the Underhowle experience coming out next year so it’s likely to rocket. I’ve also been on the scrounge. Part of a school- director’s job, nowadays, is to go out and involve the local community, and then the wider community… and also discover where the grants are.’

‘It all sounds… Utopian.’ And it did. The school at Ledwardine had just quietly closed because it was too small to survive. There hadn’t been much resistance; Ledwardine had an ageing population, and it was starting to show.

‘Look,’ Fergus said, ‘there are problems, of course there are. We’ve got a hell of a social mix here, from families where a book’s something you use to balance the table legs to the offspring of downshifting high-flyers who came here for the air quality. Sometimes I’m beating my head against a wall and saying, “Why the hell did I start all this?” But I have to tell you there are far, far more of those fist-in-the-air moments.’

His face burned with fervour. It was difficult, in here, not to feel the heat of progress, a community on the turn. Merrily wondered why she hadn’t read about this anywhere – possibly because Underhowle was on the extreme fringe of the circulation areas of most of the local papers, the Hereford Times, the Ross Gazette, The Forester. The way it was moving, it would soon be national press and TV.

‘Occasionally,’ Fergus said, ‘we’ll get some sniffy education officer coming over from Hereford, trying to put a wire in the cogs. If you’ve managed it without them, they hate you. But we’ve reached the stage where we don’t need those pygmies. Five years ago, they were ready to close the school down through lack of numbers. Now, if they tried to mess with us, we could go it alone, and they know it. Look there.’ Fergus pointed at a tray full of letters held down by a classical statuette on a plinth. ‘I actually get applications now from people in the cities prepared to move here just to get their kids into this school. I could probably fill it twice over… but I don’t want people like that. I want a proportion of those kids whose own parents can barely read. I want the mix.’

‘Except in the graveyard?’ Merrily said. It just slipped out.

A pause, Fergus frowning.

Then he grinned. ‘OK.’ He stood up, went over to his desk and switched on the red Cody computer. ‘Take a look at this.’ There was a tap on the door. ‘Yes, come in.’

It was the kid, Barney, with a tray of coffee things, and two men. Shouldn’t Barney be in class? Maybe the class system had become outdated here.

‘Perfectly timed,’ Fergus said. As if they hadn’t met before, he introduced Merrily to Chris Cody, the dark, shaven-headed twenty-something who’d made coffee for them at the village hall. Then he presented a bulky, cheerful-looking older man in a baggy cream suit. ‘And this is Piers – the scholar and gentleman who gave us this.’

They all turned to look at the computer which, Merrily noticed, had booted up in less than half the time it took hers and Jane’s. Kids liked instant. Fergus zapped an icon. A blue sky shimmered. A word formed out of white cloud, hardening up slowly.

ARICONIUM

The screen began to cloud again, around the word. ‘You heard about this, Merrily?’ Fergus asked, and she had the sensation of being drawn into the screen and what it represented, absorbed into this all-pervading enthusiasm.

‘Heard a bit about it. It’s a Roman town originally thought to be further down the valley, but new finds apparently have indicated it was actually… here?’

‘Bugger-all to see on the ground, unfortunately,’ Piers said, ‘although we think an excavation would be illuminating – and one day, not too far in the future, we’re going to have the money for it. Might persuade the Channel Four Time Team lot to start us off – that’s how we usually work… or Fergus does.’

‘The point about Ariconium,’ Fergus said, ‘is that it was as wealthy and successful – as unified – as this area’s ever been.’

On the screen a picture of Underhowle village had faded up – an overview, seen, presumably, from Howle Hill, with most of the pylons below the eye-line. There was a dull sky, duller than today’s, but it began slowly to lighten and the random scree of Underhowle’s architecture faded into a regular pattern of simpler buildings of stone and wood and a straight road along the valley.

Merrily said, ‘This is a vision of the future?’

‘You’ve got it, m’dear.’ Piers nodded, beaming. He had a football head, a loose-lipped smile. ‘Wealth. Growth.’

‘Out of iron in those days,’ Fergus said. ‘The Silures – the local Iron Age Celtic tribe – had it first. You can still see the sites of old iron workings and, of course, the hill forts above here and on Chase Hill above Ross, and into the Forest. Then the Romans crushed the Silures and Ariconium arose on the back of the iron industry, on the main road to Glevum – Gloucester – and Monmouth in the west.’

‘Iron was smelted here, big time,’ Piers said. ‘Big business. Plenty of work.’

Fergus levelled a forefinger at the screen. ‘I want the next generation to identify with that. Not with twentieth-century decay.’

We’re building this Website to chronicle the project,’ Chris Cody said in his quiet cockney accent. ‘And the school’s actively involved, along wiv the Development Committee’ – he bowed his head to the other two men – ‘in creating a visitor centre in the old Baptist chapel. There’ll be displays of the latest finds, plus reconstructions, models, computer enhancements.’

A menu had appeared. Fergus clicked on finds, and the screen filled up with a section of what looked like mosaic floor.

‘We’re expecting confirmation of a Lottery grant any day now. And then we’ll make a start. Building a tourist industry for the first time. New life, new blood, more jobs. There’s a fantastic surge of energy going through this place which you must have been able to feel.’

It certainly looked as if it was flowing through Fergus. He hit the mouse with the heel of a hand, bringing up shards of pottery, some coins, then turned to Merrily on the sofa. All three of them standing over her now, defying her to deny the energy.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I can see what you’re trying to do. It’s… exciting.’

‘Yes, it is,’ Piers Connor-Crewe said. ‘It’s bloody exciting. However, we had a taste, at the weekend, of a different kind of tourism.’

Fergus nodded grimly. He clicked on an icon bringing up the Ariconium homepage, clicked again and then the screen went blank. ‘I was about to get to that when you guys arrived.’

Of course, the point was that getting any kind of tourism here was a coup. Not only was Underhowle not a pretty place but it had the misfortune to be surrounded by places that were: riverside Ross and Symonds Yat, Goodrich with its medieval castle, Weston-under-Penyard with its hilltop Norman church. Underhowle wasn’t in the Wye Valley and it wasn’t, strictly speaking, in the Forest of Dean. There would be people over in Ledwardine who’d suggest Underhowle should be grateful for whatever it could get.

‘They’ve been coming down from Gloucester,’ Fergus Young said. ‘Over from Hereford. Up from South Wales, even. Unbelievable. Scores of them. Clogging the lane, parking on all the verges.’

‘Standing there like the morons they are,’ said Piers Connor- Crewe, ‘and just staring at the pylon, or taking photographs of their ghastly children with it in the background. Some of them brought sandwiches. Can you believe that? I mean, have you seen today’s papers?’ Piers turned to Chris Cody. ‘They’re linking Lodge with West now. West! Christ. What was that one… “Spawn of Satan”?’

‘“Devil’s Disciple”.’ Chris was smiling sadly, probably at the outdated excesses of the non-virtual world. ‘In the Sun. Or was it “Demon Seed”?’

‘Just doesn’t go away, does it?’ Piers said. ‘After all these years, that loathsome little man is still a household name. He’s won his place in the Black Pantheon now – the most famous murderer… God forbid, probably the most famous man – to come out of Herefordshire. And now Roddy Lodge. How many has Roddy killed? Could be years before they find them all. And the difference is that Gloucester Council was able to remove 25 Cromwell Street. They turned the site into a walkway so nobody can tell any more where the house was. And, as far as I know, there’s no physical memory of Frederick West in Much Marcle either – I believe they scattered his ashes in the churchyard there, and that was it. Blown away. Gone.’

‘About half the children at this school were watching when Roddy Lodge died,’ Fergus said. ‘Listening to him screaming out all that filth. We’ve talked about it with them, we’ve analysed it, we’ve had individual counselling where necessary. So the children will forget, of course they will – if they’re allowed to. We all realize we’re never going to get rid of the pylon, but we can make sure the tourist trail ends there. Merrily, I beg of you, if you have any influence at all over the Lodges, persuade them to have him decently cremated, and let’s all try to forget he ever existed.’

Chris Cody said, ‘I don’t really have a personal angle on this, but a few of our people – down the factory – are saying they got relatives in that churchyard and they don’t like to fink of them lying in the same, you know, soil, as Roddy Lodge.’

‘It’s a point,’ Fergus Young said. ‘Would you want Lodge buried side by side with members of your immediate family? No, it’s all right, I know what you’re obliged to say.’

Piers Connor-Crewe folded his arms. ‘But if it comes to the crunch, the Church itself can say no – you obviously realize that.’

‘But the Bishop hasn’t said no,’ Merrily told him. ‘I suspect he takes the line that if we were to refuse to bury sinners, it might just contravene one of the basic tenets of Christianity. As well as leaving us with the problem of where exactly to draw the line, you know?’

Connor-Crewe looked pained. ‘I understand that, but I think we’re—’

‘And let’s not forget that Lodge hadn’t actually been convicted of anything.’

‘Neither had West,’ Fergus said, ‘but that didn’t prevent some forceful opposition in Much Marcle. Which I believe succeeded.’

‘In fact, I also think I’m right in saying Lodge hadn’t even been charged.’

‘Look,’ Connor-Crewe said, ‘what you’re dealing with here – that is, us – is the polite form of protest. I can assure you that some of the locals would be more inclined towards what we might call direct action.’

‘As in… what?’

‘Well, if there is a grave, it could well get vandalized,’ Fergus said. ‘And I have to tell you we’re not only talking about relatives. I’m told there are friends of Melanie Pullman already making dark threats. And it seems to me, without laying it on too heavily, that this is as good a reason as any to tell the Lodge family it really can’t be done.’

‘All right…’ Merrily got to her feet. She’d faced hysteria, she’d faced tears and rage; there was nothing worse than reason. ‘Maybe they haven’t thought about the vandalism aspect. I’ll put it to them. But you have to understand there’s family history here. Tony Lodge feels an obligation to his father.’

‘Whereas we merely have an obligation to the future,’ Fergus Young said.

‘You have voice-mail,’ the mobile told her when she switched it on.

Merrily put the phone on the dash, sitting for a while, gazing through the windscreen at Underhowle: late-autumnal, yet throbbing with the spring of its future. Education, education, education, Tony Blair or somebody had once said, when asked about New Labour’s priorities for a new Britain. She wondered what it would be like to have Underhowle as your parish: a kindergarten rather than a retirement home. Couldn’t see anything progressive in it for the Church, not short-term anyway. Not with the narrow and cynical Jerome Banks in place.

‘It’s out, then,’ Huw Owen’s voice grated from the mailbank. ‘Bliss – self-seeking little bastard. Lass, I’m coming over tonight. Don’t go anywhere.’

She flung her head back over the top of the seat, where the headrest had come off. Bloody men with their bloody agendas. She closed her eyes.

When she opened them, another shadow had fallen across the side window.

‘I’m gonna take a chance on this,’ Sam Hall said when she wearily wound it down. ‘I think you have to be Merrily Watkins.’

33 Empty Heart

IT WAS ALL here, from the Norwegian cast-iron wood-burning stove – no glass, therefore no friendly flames to watch – to the two solar panels in the roof. Even the radio was clockwork, but there was a small, traditional stereo. His one vice, he said.

Otherwise, showpiece good-life. But how good was it really? It was a dark room, this big living area; the windows were triple-glazed and small. One of them, in a wall insulated with several hundred tightly packed books, offered a view down the hillside, picking up a line of pylons.

The wrong view, it seemed to Merrily.

‘I know… you’re asking yourself why,’ Sam said. ‘Why, if I want to live like this, don’t I do it on some Hebridean island, or in the empty heart of Wales?’

‘I did wonder that, but then I thought I’d come up with an answer. Which was: because he needs to keep reminding himself of something?’

‘You must’ve been a great loss to the cops, Mrs Watkins.’ Silent laughter in the dimness. ‘That goddam Bliss could’ve saved us all a heap of time and trouble if he hadn’t tried to pass you off as a detective.’

‘Why did he come to talk to you again?’

‘Usual stuff. He saw Ingrid, too. What did we know about Lodge? Did we know of any other girls Roddy went out with? Any guys he hung around with? I doubt if I was able to help him.’

But you think you can help me?’

‘Maybe we can help each other.’ Sam got down on his knees, opened up the stove and fed it a log that looked to have been sawn to size. ‘OK, I’m gonna condense this – I’d rather have derision any day than pity. Yeah, you’re right, of course. I lost my only kid to leukaemia in the States and, yeah, we lived directly under power lines and, sure, I became fanatical about the whole issue, drank too much, destroyed my marriage. And now I’m back in England and I’m still angry and I figure this is still a small enough country to make an impact. And yeah, you’re sorry for my loss – thank you – so that’s all that dealt with. How much did Lol tell you?’

‘He told me what you’d said about hot spots and the symbolism of the plague cross. And he said there was a spiritual side to it that he thought you weren’t inclined to discuss with him.’

‘The spiritual side, yeah. I guess he and I caught more than a hint of all that the night Roddy died. When we met in Ross, Lol had this other lady with him who I thought was gonna be you, and it threw me when she turned out to be another singer, so I kind of clammed up.’

‘Moira Cairns,’ Merrily said neutrally.

‘I think I was supposed to have heard of her. I guess I was away too long.’

‘The spiritual side…?’ Merrily prompted.

‘Sure. I tried to talk to the Reverend Banks one time, but if you’ve ever had anything to do with that guy…’

Merrily nodded. Sam Hall, bulked out with an Icelandic sweater, waved her to a big, overstuffed armchair and put himself into another. He’d untied his ponytail and salty hair framed his bearded face.

‘When I was a kid we lived for a while in the village. My dad was a friend of old man Lodge and I was a few years older than Tony Lodge, and Roddy was just a small kid when I left for the States. So I knew the family well enough to recognize the changes when I came back.’

‘What did you do out there?’

‘Oh, I was a film cameraman for some years – industrial, nothing glamorous, no movies. Then I got into some stills work for the underground press, who paid peanuts in the early days, though it improved when magazines like Rolling Stone took off. And that got me into radical politics – I was kind of an old hippy even when hippies were young. Which was fun. I wound up in this commune with my wife on the edge of the Nevada Desert – under power lines, as it happened. And then our daughter, Delawney, got sick and died and it all got serious. I guess I… became a little crazy for a while – paranoid. Became convinced the power industry had a contract out on me – hell, maybe they did, those bastards. When the wife walked out on me, I decided it was time to make plans to come back to the green and pleasant land.’

‘Only to find the power industry had beaten you to it?’

‘Yeah, and what was worse’ – Sam walked over to the window and looked down the valley – ‘the village had come out to meet the pylons. They must’ve been some distance away at first, with only the Baptist Chapel and the old garage up close. But then they built the council estate, with some houses right under the damn cables. Nobody gave a shit in those days, and of course some developers and local authorities still don’t. I was so mad when I saw that. It ignited all the old rage, and I thought, this time, this time, I’m really gonna do something about it.’ He turned around. ‘Hell, Mrs Watkins, this wasn’t gonna be about me, I was gonna give you the science.’

‘I’m not that good at science.’

‘And I found out one thing about the British media – you only get one chance. They come and they do one serious story on you and after that you either succeed or you become a joke. I became a joke very quickly. The Fool on the Hill – that’s my sig tune. By the time I had something worth saying, nobody was hearing me.’

‘And that was?’

‘Roddy Lodge, of course. And Melanie Pullman. Fellow sufferers, but it was Melanie I was most concerned about – maybe a mistake.’

‘Sufferers from what?’

‘Let me start at the beginning – which isn’t too long ago. Not quite three years. Just around the time my honeymoon with the media was coming to an end. The day Melanie Pullman told me about the lights in the night.’

Gomer climbed down from the digger. It was not yet lunchtime.

‘Done?’ Lol was surprised: it was already over and he could still walk? In fact, the ground frost, the wintry friction in the air, had put an edge on his senses.

‘At a quarter of the bloody Efflapure price,’ Gomer said, ‘and no fancy dials to check. Now, if you go up the house, get her to flush every toilet they got – upstairs, downstairs, en suite, the lot. Wanner make sure it’s coming through proper, see.’

Gomer beamed; he knew it would. On the way here, he’d talked about his mistake concerning Lodge and the fire and how the vicar had helped him get that into perspective. Gomer seemed very relieved this morning, like a Jack Russell unleashed.

Walking up the leaf-matted lawn, past the Gomer Parry Plant Hire truck, Lol saw smoke coming from one of the chimneys of what was a nice old stone house built at a time when nothing heavier than a horse would be moving along whatever had pre-dated the A49. Through a front window, as he passed, he saw Mrs Pawson hunched close to a wood-burner in the inglenook. She rose quickly, had the front door open before he reached it.

‘Is it finished?’ She looked pinched and starved.

‘Gomer thinks so. He’d like you to flush all the loos. Could I… help?’

She hesitated. ‘All right.’ A bit snappy. ‘The downstairs one’s just there, off the hall. I’ll do upstairs.’

He flushed the downstairs cloakroom toilet and went back outside to wait for her. He noticed the front door had two new locks, big-city style. When she came down, she was wearing a thick green woollen jacket and still looked shivery.

He smiled. ‘It should be fine. Anyway. Gomer won’t leave until it’s all perfect.’

‘Oh…’ Mrs Pawson shook her head absently, as if he’d said something unnecessarily technical. ‘I just want it to be working, that’s all. Then I can get out of here.’

‘For good?’

‘What do you think?’ She looked at Lol as though she wouldn’t expect someone like him really to understand. ‘Look, if you need me for anything, I’m booked into the Royal in Ross for tonight, to see estate agents. Then I’m going back to London. Mr Parry has my address, for the bill.’

‘You feel personally unsettled by all this?’

She’d turned away, as if to go back into the house. She turned back. ‘What do you mean by that?’

‘Well, he’s dead. And she…’ It wasn’t as if she was murdered here, was what he meant.

Mrs Pawson looked away from him, along the drive towards the road. ‘There was a morning paper in the hotel lounge, which I was silly enough to pick up. They now think he had a sick fascination with Frederick West, they don’t know how many other women he killed, and his neighbours don’t want him to be buried at their church. Is it so hard to see why this house is blighted for me?’

Gomer had talked about West on the way here, telling Lol about what had been in the attaché case they’d dug up at the back of the bungalow.

Mrs Pawson looked at Lol. ‘Did you know Lodge?’

‘Only by… by sight.’

‘He was a nightmare,’ she said. ‘A nightmare person.’ She was holding the lapels of her jacket together across her throat. ‘And so was the woman.’

‘She was with him, when…?’

Mrs Pawson didn’t reply and started to walk away then, but he sensed a very real distress that didn’t seem to fit in with the kind of woman she was. And afterwards he talked to Gomer about this, and Gomer agreed.

Sam reached over his shoulder and pulled a loose-leaf binder from a shelf behind him. ‘I’m not gonna make you read this, I just want you to know it exists. It’s the report of a six-year study out of Bristol University, linking power lines to a bunch of different cancers, depression and an estimated sixty suicides a year.’

‘I didn’t know about the suicides,’ Merrily said. ‘But I’ve heard about the other health scares.’

‘It’s estimated that the deaths caused by power lines equate with the number of fatalities on the road. But, as only one in fifty of the population lives under power lines, that makes the risk fifty times as big. We’re talking heavy shit here, Reverend, and it’s no surprise that governments and the power industry try to rubbish it.’

‘I understand that, but…’

‘But where do you come in? I’m getting there. Let’s look at what’s more or less proven. Magnetic fields reduce the body’s production of melatonin, which is manufactured by the pineal gland at night and regulates mood. People living under power lines suffer insomnia – sleep deprivation. And because of the reduced melatonin levels, people living under power lines are prone to depression. Sure, you’ll find wonderfully cheerful, fit characters who spent their whole lives under 140,000 volts – some folk produce more melatonin than others. However, those with a tendency to depression may find they become very depressed. And those already very depressed may become suicidal.’

‘And people suffering from manic depression…?’

‘May become more manic and more depressed. Loosely, whatever you got there’s a strong possibility that electromagnetism will intensify it. And a certain number of people are gonna develop a chronic condition that we called electro-hypersensitivity – EH. That’s where the whole body becomes allergic to electricity. So you see, the risks from power lines are many and varied… and more varied than any of us could’ve imagined.’

He replaced the loose-leaf folder on the shelf, placed his hands on his knees and looked down, gathering his argument.

‘When I was living near the Nevada Desert, in the eighties, the alternative lifestyle was getting jaded – too many bad drugs, too much paranoia. The spark had gone out. Around the time my daughter got sick, one of the guys in the commune started rambling about saucers coming in the night, landing in the desert. Humanoids in silver suits who came and took him out of his bed and messed him around. Ten years earlier, we’d have been like: Hey, cool, let’s all light candles, get out there and welcome the mothership, man! In the eighties, however, we were suspecting he might be a little crazy.’

‘A lot of it about – alien-abduction stories.’

‘Sure. Those were paranoid times, the Reagan years. Was it aliens, or was it the government?’

‘So when did you hear about Melanie Pullman’s experience?’ Merrily asked.

‘Aha!’ He leaned forward. ‘Who told you about that?’

‘Her family called in my predecessor, suspecting their house might be haunted. We actually have files.’

‘And you’ve seen the file?’

‘Yes.’ She told him about the red or orange light bathing the bed, Melanie’s belief that she was taken away by grey creatures with big eyes like mirrors and subjected to an examination that ended with one of them having sexual intercourse with her. ‘Which she seems to have found not entirely unpleasant.’

‘Good,’ Sam Hall said. ‘I mean, that’s right. That’s what she told me.’

‘When was this?’

‘Year or so after she saw the priest, I’d guess. She told me he’d said some prayers and threw a little holy water around but that it didn’t help much, long term.’

‘So it happened again.’

‘Twice. Not precisely the same, but similar enough as makes no difference.’

‘This was widely known around the village?’

Hell, no. Nobody wants to be thought crazy. No, it came out when I ran into Melanie one day leaving the doctor’s surgery – Ruck, you know him? Asshole of the old school. Anyway, the kid looked like shit, and the point is, I knew where she lived, and I’d heard she hadn’t been well.’

‘She lived on the former council estate.’

‘Yeah, but whereabouts? Right in the arc of the turning circle at the end of Goodrich Close is where. The damn pylon – next one along to the one where Roddy Lodge died – is almost in the back garden. The lines are directly overhead. Plus you’re in line with the TV booster across the valley and… I won’t go on, but this is close to the centre of the hot spot defined by Lodge’s garage and the old Baptist Chapel.’

‘So you think…’ Merrily was getting an idea of where this was going. She remembered Canon Dobbs’s conclusion that Melanie Pullman had undergone a genuine hallucinatory or dream experience, had not been making it up. ‘You think that the effects of, for instance, sleep loss caused by electromagnetism might have been causing her to hallucinate. Like your friend under the power lines in the Nevada Desert?’

‘Which, at the time, we attributed to far too many drugs over the years. But let me say first of all, this is not only me. There’s been considerable research – OK, fringe research, but that’s how it usually starts – which demonstrates a correlation between both alien-visitation experiences and some plain old- fashioned hauntings, and the presence of high-voltage overhead lines, usually in conjunction with other radiation from TV transmitters, mobile-phone masts, sub-stations… I could find you scores of examples.’

‘Well, sure… but how is it explained?’

‘The effect of electromagnetic fields on the brain… on specific areas of the brain – irradiation of the temporal lobes, for instance, can promote a sensation of what you might call “presence”. Of not being alone. Stimulation of the septum area of the brain can produce intense sexual sensations, which explains—’

‘Except that, in Melanie’s case, there was also, if I recall, a vaginal infection?’

‘Mrs Watkins…’ Sam spread his hands. ‘I wouldn’t claim to be any kind of authority on women’s clinical conditions. However, the growth on the body of various fungal bacteria, of the candida type, can, I assure you, be accelerated by exposure to a significant degree of electromagnetism. You are free to check this out with whatever scientific or medical sources you may have access to.’

‘Can I have a cigarette?’

‘Depends what kind of lighter you have… No, I’m kidding, help yourself. If tobacco was all we had to worry about, I’d be a happier man. Look, Mrs Watkins, this kind of stuff is not helpful to me or my cause, which is why I’ve never made an issue of it. Tell the Great British Public they could be in for leukaemia or a brain tumour and you’ve got their full attention. Warn them of possible encounters with alien beings or a ghost in the bedroom, they heave a big sigh of relief, say: “Phew, so it can’t be true about the cancer either.” Believe me, I do not need this shit. I beg your pardon if that seems to be demeaning your profession – it wasn’t intended that way.’

‘Don’t worry about it. What happened with Melanie?’

‘She worked at a chemist’s, in Ross, and I met her for lunch one day and it all came out. For instance, for some time she’d been finding it impossible to watch TV and was going up to her room – which made it worse, of course. Her room was at the rear of the house, backing onto the pylon, wires zooming immediately overhead. She couldn’t sleep and… you know the rest. Also, by this time, she was becoming allergic to her place of work – all those huge bright lights in the drugstore. I advised her to start looking for another job… someplace darker, at least.’

‘And was she involved with Roddy Lodge at this time?’

‘She’d been with Roddy ’bout a year. See, this was before Roddy’s big change. He hadn’t been long in his own place, and I imagine she was his first real girlfriend. It was a case of like attracting like. Although he was maybe ten years older than she was, they’d both had experiences they couldn’t explain – stuff they couldn’t even discuss with most other people. It must’ve been kind of a relief to both of them when they found out they weren’t alone.’

‘Roddy being under the same power lines…’

‘Well, let’s not forget he’d been around power lines all his life – got some big ones going over the farm. But when he moved, he was right in the heart of the hot spot. Whatever was happening to him before must’ve been intensified hugely once he was in that bungalow.’

‘Did they know this? Had they put two and two together?’

‘I don’t believe they had. People often don’t. Roddy, for instance, was convinced there was something wrong with his eyes. Took to wearing dark glasses and working at night when he could. And I’m sure that relieved the symptoms to an extent. No, I told Melanie what I knew and referred her to an alternative practitioner in Hereford who wasn’t as blind to all this as the medical profession seems to be. I don’t think she managed to persuade Roddy to go, too, because things were becoming complicated by then. Am I making the remotest kind of sense to you, Mrs Watkins?’

‘I rather think you are.’

‘You’re making connections.’

‘Too many.’

‘Anything you want confirmation of, I have whole shelves of reports…’

‘I just want to think about this. How much have you told Bliss?’

‘Hell, none of it. Guy’s a cop. He’s gonna believe Lodge’s behaviour was conditioned by electromagnetic radiation? Does he care? He just wants to know where the other bodies are buried.’

‘And were you able to help him on that?’

‘No.’ Sam stood up and walked back to the window with the view down Howle Hill towards the pylons and Underhowle. ‘Do I think Melanie Pullman’s dead? Maybe… but maybe not. There was every reason for her just to get the hell out of here and not look back. See, she was coming to see me quite often those last few months – reporting her progress. She’d taken a vacation with some relations up in Shropshire, well away from power lines. Done some walking up there. Cut out the Valium, of course. When she came back home, she switched bedrooms to a smaller room at the front of the house, not directly under the cables. Gave in her notice at the drugstore. She was feeling a little better – even just knowing about it makes you feel a different person. But electro-allergy goes deep. It takes a long time to get it out of your system, if you’re lucky enough to be able to do that totally. There’s good reason to think she just upped and left Underhowle, knowing there was no future for her, healthwise, in this place.’

‘Leaving all her possessions, all her clothes?’

‘Maybe she went someplace else and felt so good she just didn’t come back. Maybe she met somebody. People do this kind of thing with far less reason than she had.’

‘What about Roddy?’

‘I think she tried to help him, I really do. I just don’t think he wanted to know. Besides, he had a new girlfriend by then. He had Lynsey. And he was changing – boy was he changing.’

‘Would you mind if I told Bliss about this?’

He shrugged. ‘Long as there’s no comeback on me.’

‘I think I can guarantee that.’ Merrily stood up. ‘So that’s what you meant when you told Lol about a spiritual aspect to all this.’

‘Uh…’ Sam turned his back on the view, plucked at his Icelandic sweater. ‘I guess I still hope it is. I’m not sure. I have a friend – you met Ingrid Sollars?’

‘At the hall.’

‘Sure you did. Well, Ingrid and I are very close friends, but we don’t always agree. And there’s stuff happening here…’ Sam shook his head. ‘I dunno…’

‘What stuff?’

‘Could I go fetch Ingrid?’

Merrily looked at her watch. ‘I have to go and see Cherry Lodge, and then I’ve got to get back for someone. Can I call you? Tonight, maybe?’

‘Sure.’ Sam followed her to the door. ‘This has become a weird place, Mrs Watkins. And more than a little sick.’

Parked outside the Lodge farm, Merrily called Bliss from the car and left a message on his voice-mail. Cherry Lodge, in her army parka, was coming round the side of the house, carrying a paper sack of mixed corn.

‘Been and seen them, have you, Reverend?’ She put down the corn sack. Freed from fog, the farmhouse behind her looked less stable, with rubble-stone showing through holes in the rendering. Less fortified.

‘I’ll come straight to the point,’ Merrily said. ‘Has anybody threatened you?’

Cherry Lodge managed a tired smile. Merrily decided not to tell her about her own anonymous caller.

‘Just I was told that people – friends of Melanie Pullman – had threatened to damage Roddy’s grave, if… if there was one.’

‘There’s brave of them.’ Cherry pulled the sack of corn up against the wall. ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’

‘No, thanks, I’ve got to get back. Erm… the other argument is that it’ll be an unpleasant sort of attraction to the wrong kind of tourists. But the committee said that to you, didn’t they?’

‘The wrong kind of tourists. Oh yes, we had that.’

‘Cherry, in your e-mail, you said how much Roddy had changed when he went to live on his own. You said he’d become more confident. Did he change in any other way? I mean, for instance, he went around all the time in dark glasses… people saying he was a bit of a poser. But could there have been another reason? For instance, Sam Hall thinks—’

‘Sam thinks a lot of things and some of them sound sensible and some sound like rubbish and I don’t think he knows the difference. What does it matter now? Roddy killed a woman – only one woman, as far as we know, despite all this West rubbish – and then he killed himself. And if he was going to kill a woman – and don’t go quoting me – then he couldn’t have chosen a better one. Slut. Gold-digger. She kept coming back. He’d try and get away from her, go out with other women, but she kept coming back. Maybe, God forbid, he couldn’t get rid of her any other way.’

‘Look,’ Merrily said. ‘I’ll have to ask you one more time, because I don’t really know how deep the feelings are down there, but you do still want to go ahead with burial? You won’t opt for cremation, perhaps a plaque in the church?’

‘Mrs Watkins…’ Cherry’s face wore BSE and foot-and- mouth and stupid EU regulations in layers of dried-out anxiety; what did she care about petty village vigilantes with a manufactured crisis? ‘If anyone vandalizes the grave, it’s up to the police to deal with it. Anyone threatens us, we’ll deal with it.’

‘And you’re… happy about tomorrow, rather than Friday.’

‘We’re not happy about any of it,’ Cherry Lodge said. ‘But if it’s what we have to do to keep it quiet, it’s what we’ll do.’

‘What about flowers and things? You got all that arranged?’

‘Flowers for Roddy? I don’t think so.’

Merrily nodded. ‘You know my number.’

‘Don’t take too much notice of Sam,’ Cherry said. ‘And don’t try and find excuses for Roddy – it’s not worth it now.’

‘Don’t you want to know the truth?’

‘I don’t think we ever will know. Perhaps some of it’s beyond knowing.’

‘You mean the ghosts? The dead women?’

‘I won’t talk about that again. It needed to be said, that’s all. It was hanging over me. Hanging over the family and never talked about. I just thought that, now he’s gone, someone outside should know. Just to… take it off us.’

Merrily nodded. There was more than one level of exorcism.

But she no longer thought it was beyond knowing.

When she was on the A49, the other side of Ross, the mobile bleeped and she pulled the Volvo into the kerb. It was Bliss, and she told him what she wanted.

34 EH

RECORD OF INTERVIEW

Person interviewed: RODERICK LODGE

Place of interview: HEREFORD HQ

Time commenced: 10.30 a.m. Time concluded: 11.23 a.m.

Duration of interview: 53 mins Tape reference no.: HHQ

3869/1

Interviewing Officer(s): DI BLISS, DS MUMFORD

Other persons present: NONE

MERRILY HAD PHONED Frannie Bliss to ask if he had a copy of the actual tapes, but transcripts was the best he could do. He’d arrived at the vicarage as the day was fading, in hiking jacket, jeans and a terrible mood.

‘This better be worth it, that’s all. Coming, as it does, on a day I just want to be… over.’

‘Caffeine?’

‘Intravenous, if you have it, please, Merrily.’ He hooked out a dining chair with his foot, collapsed into it.

‘I’ve only seen the Telegraph so far,’ she said.

‘How I wish I could say the flamin’ same.’

She poured coffee for him and sat down opposite. She’d changed into jeans and a black, cowl-neck sweater. ‘I thought you wanted it to come out about West.’

Not like this.’ Screwing up his eyes as if he’d been hit in the face. ‘When I had some evidence. When I could go in and say, right, dig there, lads. I agreed it was the best thing to sit on it, meanwhile not to panic parents, husbands…’

What had happened was that Bliss had asked Andy Mumford to keep his ear to the ground, and one of Andy Mumford’s contacts in Much Marcle, birthplace of Fred West, had told him that Roddy Lodge had been seen there a couple of months ago with a woman answering Lynsey’s description. Mumford had gone over there, in his own time, and talked to a few people, testing out an idea of Bliss’s that Lodge might have disposed of a body in the area of Fred’s old burial ground – some kind of homage. It was one of the blokes Mumford talked to in the pub who’d gone to the press.

‘He’d had some money in the past for background stuff on the West family – in these difficult times, farmers are encouraged to diversify. Well, I couldn’t let Andy take the shit for that. Had to phone Fleming, tell him it was me behind it.’

‘Honourable of you.’

‘Yeh. What the Japanese call the honourable way out.’

‘And how did Fleming react?’

‘Dunno, Merrily. I was on the mobile and the signal was weak, you know?’

‘You got cut off.’

‘Question of postponing the inevitable. I’m stuffed, anyway.’ Bliss tapped the interview forms. ‘What’s this about?’

She got up and brought over the lamp from the window ledge. ‘You probably won’t like it.’

‘Now you tell me.’

‘You remember you once asked me if there could be a spiritual aspect?’

Bliss said, ‘I now know all about West’s claims that he was involved with a black magic sect, supplying them with virgins. That was investigated. Normally, you’d treat that kind of crap with a big pinch of salt, but this was a guy for whom no muck- heap was too smelly. Compared with some of the things Fred did ‘to women, black magic was cucumber sarnies on the terrace.’

‘I may disagree there, but that’s not what I meant. I think you said you talked to his GP?’

‘Dr Ruck. Didn’t speak to him meself, but I gather he wasn’t the kind to come the old patient-confidentiality. He thought Roddy was neurotic, possibly depressive, and prone to hypochondria.’

‘What, forever coming to him with headaches and various pains?’

‘That kind of thing.’

‘Maybe the sort of symptoms he was exhibiting in the interview room?’

‘What is this, Merrily?’

She was skimming through the first transcript, an interview laid out like a radio play.

DI BLISS: Roddy, a dead woman, now identified as Lynsey

Davies, was found in a truck registered to you and being

driven by you. How do you explain this?

DEFENDANT: What you saying?

DI BLISS: It’s a simple question, Roddy. Why was Lynsey

Davies’s body on your truck? A body that was decaying,

having been in the ground for some time.

DEF: She was cold down there, look.

DI BLISS: I see.

DEF: Told me she was cold, so I went and fetched her out.

DI BLISS: How do you mean she told you, Roddy?

DEF: She come to me.

DI BLISS: I’m sorry?

DEF: Come to me in the night, look. They comes to me in the

night and I’m cold too. Hard and cold. BLISS: Hang on, let me get this right – you’re saying this

was after she was dead? No – for the tape, please, Roddy, don’t just nod or shake your head. You mean after she was dead.

DEF: Yes.

DI BLISS: After you killed her.

DEF: Trying to trap me now, ain’t you, copper?

DI BLISS: I’m being absolutely straight with you, Roddy. You were found with the dead body of Lynsey Davies. Somebody killed her, and as you seem to have buried her and dug her up again, you will agree that it’s reasonable to suppose you also had something to do with her death. How well did you know Lynsey Davies?

DEF: Her said I was Satan. Give it her hard and cold like Satan.

DI BLISS: Was Lynsey Davies your girlfriend?

DEF: I ain’t feeling good. Got a headache.

DI BLISS: Can I get you a glass of water?

DEF: Got a headache. Can’t think proper.

DI BLISS: Roddy, you’ve seen a doctor, and he’s pronounced you well enough to be interviewed.

DEF: Can’t think. It’s bloody shitty in here.

DI BLISS: This is not productive, Roddy. I asked you if you wanted a solicitor, and you said no, giving me the strong impression you were prepared to answer my questions. Now why aren’t you doing that, Roddy? What’s up with you, son?

DEF. Can’t think in here.

‘I’m sure you said that, once or twice, he appeared to black out – to faint,’ Merrily said.

‘He put his head down on the table, yes. He gave the appearance of having lost consciousness. He gave the appearance of it.’

‘Frannie, if this was the same interview room you took me into, it was below ground level and lit by a fluorescent tube. It had electric air-conditioning. It had a tape machine. Also a video camera. An awful lot of electricity for a very small room – even I found it unhealthy in there.’

‘Well, you know,’ Bliss said, ‘we’d naturally prefer to chat to prisoners in the police conservatory, to a background of gentle fountains and aromatherapy candles, but the uncouth ruffians are apt to throw up, break things and wee on the walls.’

‘Humour me some more, Francis. How would the interview room compare to, say, Roddy’s cell, which I think he kept asking to be taken back to. How much power was there in the cell?’

‘Just the one ceiling light. But—’

‘You ever heard of EH, Frannie?’ She rose up. ‘And don’t tell me it’s a hospital show on Channel Four.’

‘No. I haven’t heard of it.’

‘Electrical Hypersensitivity. An allergy affecting people surrounded by electronic gadgetry or living in close proximity to high-voltage power lines and a confluence of transmitted signals, such as from mobile-phone masts, TV transmitters, satellite—’

‘Merrily—’

‘Probably only a very small percentage of people are affected to any marked degree. But in some cases we’re talking about a serious, chronic condition. You might find, for instance, if you looked into it, that Roddy Lodge was unusually sensitive to electric light and wore sunglasses even at night-time. You might find he was unable to wear nylon overalls because of the static or whatever. And we already know about his mood swings – miserable and withdrawn and then, “I’m Number One, I’m Satan, I’m the best drainage man in the known universe, the biggest serial killer…” ’

Bliss smiled. ‘So this is your personal diagnosis. Roddy was suffering from a condition that appears to have gone entirely undetected by various doctors and psychiatrists, but may be identified by priests.’

Merrily sighed. ‘I realize it’s something not universally accepted.’

‘Now tell me something I hadn’t already surmised.’ Bliss leaned back, locking his fingers behind his head. ‘Like what other bullshit Mr Sam Hall filled you up with.’

Jane put her head around the door then. Merrily hadn’t heard her come in from school. A long talk was way overdue.

‘Hello, flower. You want some coffee?’

‘No, thanks. Sorry, didn’t know you were busy.’

‘You can come in if you want, Jane,’ Bliss said. ‘This is nothing I’d be terribly afraid of a little child hearing.’

‘It’s OK,’ Jane said, with world-weary indifference. ‘I try not to be seen hanging out with the Filth. People might think I’m a snout.’ Her head vanished and they heard her going upstairs.

‘I love that kid,’ Bliss said. ‘She’s just like you, only more so.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Look, don’t get me wrong. I even quite like Mr Hall, the old shit-stirrer, and I think his intentions are good. I even think there’s probably a lot to what he says, about the profusion of overhead power lines arguably causing ill health. I just think that kind of wild speculation, at this stage of the game, about a man who isn’t ever gonna be able to confirm it, is a totally pointless exercise.’

‘It does explain a lot of things, though, doesn’t it? It might even make sense to Mr Nye, the lawyer, who was convinced his client was in poor health.’

‘So tell him! I’m sure he’d absolutely love to spend an hour or so, at no fee whatsoever, discussing his dead client’s medical mythology.’

‘It also explains why Roddy blacked out – which is commonplace, apparently.’

‘Who says?’

‘Frannie, look, I had already heard of this. But it’s something Hall’s been researching for years, here and in America. I find it convincing, or at least worth investigating, but that’s neither here nor there. I’m not out to try to prove or disprove it, I’m just saying it answers – very plausibly – a lot of questions.’

‘No, it doesn’t, Merrily, it just—’

‘And it also explains why Roddy Lodge confessed to every putative murder you could lay on him.’

‘Aw, come on!’

‘EH is an acute condition. It can apparently become entirely unbearable. He’d have confessed to strangling his own granny to get out of that interview room.’

‘Whose side are you on at all?’

‘He’d offer to show you as many bodies as you wanted just to get you to take him out of there. All the people he hadn’t murdered.’

‘All right.’ Bliss finished off his coffee and laid down the mug. ‘Let’s look at this. He wanted us to take him out of the horrible, electronically charged interview room, back to his nice country home under the big pylon – which he then proceeded to climb.’ He gave her a big smile. ‘Go on, you take it from there.’

Merrily didn’t say anything. She’d put the same point to Sam Hall. He’d said that in his experience no two cases of EH were exactly the same. He said allergics were often mysteriously drawn to the allergen in its most obvious form. He said a certain frequency of the electromagnetic field might prove particularly addictive to a particular person. He said this all needed much more research, but it was one explanation of why Roddy had climbed that pylon, just like he’d done repeatedly as a boy.

‘Did you know that Melanie Pullman was a fellow sufferer?’

Bliss’s eyes narrowed.

‘With side effects. You interested?’

‘Go on,’ he said.

She told him about the side effects. She brought out the transcript of Canon Dobbs’s report. Bliss read it slowly. He looked up and didn’t smile. This is getting very silly, Merrily, even by your standards. Now we learn she was taken by aliens. Could even be the same aliens that strangled Lynsey and buried her under the tank.’

She carried on, in the face of it all. ‘I also gather Roddy Lodge had been having inexplicable experiences for most of his life, and that his condition worsened when he moved to the bungalow, where electromagnetic radiation levels were far stronger. It seems likely their relationship – him and Melanie – grew out of mutual support.’

Frannie Bliss gritted his teeth, making a hissing noise. ‘So they were both bonkers. What does that tell us? Does it explain why he might have killed her?’

‘You’re sorry you got me into this, now, aren’t you?’

‘I just don’t understand why you suddenly care so much,’ he said.

‘Because I’m burying him, and too many funerals today are superficial and meaningless and don’t manage to lay anything to rest – we talk to relatives and we gather up a handful of anecdotes about the deceased and reel them off, then it’s on with the soil and bring on the next one. I just think we owe it to them to try to understand what their lives were about. God, didn’t that sound pompous?’

In the dregs of the daylight, she saw a shadow shambling past the big kitchen window. Not many people came round the back, not even Lol. This was someone who liked to move softly, like God’s secret agent. Someone who even used spy-type euphemisms for the negative numina of his trade: volatiles, insomniacs, hitch-hikers… Bliss had his back to the window and hadn’t seen the shadow.

She stood up. ‘So… how are things at home, Frannie?’

‘Crap, thank you,’ Bliss said.

‘Huw’s here.’

‘Owen?’ He stood up quickly. ‘Shit. Is there another door out of here?’

35 Sackcloth

SHE’D NEVER SEEN Huw like this before. He was white with anger, and he was wagging a forefinger under Frannie Bliss’s nose.

‘… Always feet first. Bloody great copper’s boots. No matter how long you’re in the CID, you never lose them copper’s boots!’

The finger trembling in the lamplight.

‘Huw…’ Bliss was out of his chair again, and they were nearly head-to-head across the table. ‘It’s my career going down the bloody toilet, pal!’

Not the most well-chosen response, all things considered.

‘Oh aye.’ Huw’s expression was… not priestly. ‘Never a thought for the parents of all them dead and missing girls, lying awake night after bloody night wondering precisely what were done to their kids and how many times. Waking up in the dark, heads full of cellars and concrete. Dreams full of blood and filth and sobbing and wondering how long it went on before they died. How much of it they took before they wound up naked and dead under some… some bloody septic tank.’

‘For starters,’ Bliss said through his teeth, ‘Lynsey Davies wasn’t in fact found naked.’

‘You wanted a national scare. Big, high-profile case to play with.’

‘But not now, for Christ’s sake! Will you just let me—?’

‘Will you both, for God’s sake, shut up?’ Merrily said quietly. ‘You’re scaring the cat.’ She came and sat down at the far end of the long table, away from both of them. ‘And me.’

‘Aye,’ Huw said, looking at her at last, as if realizing where he was. ‘I’m sorry.’

And she was shocked at the sight of him, at how much someone could change in six months or so. He was wearing his clerical shirt, the dog collar parchmented with age, under a patched tweed jacket. The effect was decrepit rather than casual. His long hair was dry and salted with dandruff, and there were lines she didn’t remember down each cheek, deep as sewn-up knife wounds. He was breathing hard.

‘Papers came same day for once. West, West, West. They all want him to be another West.’

‘And what do you want?’ Frannie Bliss’s face was maroon under the freckles. ‘We let it lie? We let the missing stay missing, the bodies stay buried?’

Huw had shut his eyes, was digging his knuckles into the table top. He stayed like that for several seconds before breathing out and opening his eyes, pulling out a rueful smile like an old handkerchief.

‘Hello, lass.’

‘Hello, Huw.’

‘That woman,’ Huw said to Bliss, as if the last few minutes had somehow been wiped. ‘Lynsey. Were there any bits of her missing?’

‘Bits?’ Bliss sat down again.

‘Bones. Fingers, toes.’

‘Like Fred did to them?’

‘Aye.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Merrily said.

‘All of the West victims,’ Bliss told her, ‘had several bones missing. Mostly fingers and toes, but sometimes shoulder bones. Like he was keeping souvenirs.’

‘Another of the reasons the Gloucester coppers suspected occult belief,’ Huw said. ‘A sense of ritual about it – always took the same bones.’

‘I’ve been reading as fast as I can,’ Merrily said. ‘I just haven’t got to this bit.’

‘Came to a lot of bones – well over a hundred. None of them have ever been found.’ Bliss turned to Huw. ‘No, Roddy didn’t go that far. Not with Lynsey. But then, she wasn’t your regular victim, was she?’

‘There were no regular victims, wi’ West.’ Huw’s voice was as flat as hardboard again. ‘Mostly they just ended up dead because there was nowhere else for them to go.’

Merrily winced.

‘What I mean is,’ Frannie Bliss said, ‘Roddy probably killed Lynsey because she found out about him – what he’d been up to. Not just as a result of getting his rocks off.’

‘West killed his own daughter, Heather, because she said she were leaving the happy home,’ Huw said. ‘Lost patience with her.’ He turned to Merrily. ‘Do you remember Donna Furlowe?’

‘No. Who was she?’

Huw mopped up some spilled coffee with his sleeve, possibly to hide the fact that he wasn’t replying. What the hell was the matter with him?

‘I’ll leave you to explain, Huw,’ Bliss said. ‘And then Merrily can tell you about this wonderful pseudo-scientific theory which argues that, far from being a psychotic serial killer, Lodge was actually a victim of his environment. Should comfort a lot of people.’

Huw looked up at Merrily. That old wolfhound look.

‘I’m going home now,’ Bliss said, ‘to try and get used to spending more time with me family, who hate me nearly as much as me colleagues.’

Merrily had put the lamp back on the window sill. It was all a little mellower in the room now. Huw was drinking tea, dunking chocolate digestive biscuits in it. His voice was softer.

‘A twenty-first-century plague village, eh? Would it worry you to live there?’

‘Actually,’ Merrily said, ‘I was only thinking earlier how much more exciting Underhowle was – more progressive, more alive than Ledwardine. But I suppose everything has its drawbacks. I mean, you can go on telling yourself it’s all overheated rubbish, but every time somebody dies prematurely after living for five years under high-voltage power lines you immediately forget about all the people who spent half a lifetime underneath and made it to ninety-six.’

‘And the apparitions? The hallucinations? The little grey men with big eyes?’

‘Used to be that electrical gadgets were affected by aliens. Now they’re saying electricity creates the aliens.’

‘I can buy it,’ Huw said. ‘I can also accept that electrical stimulation of the temporal lobes, whether it’s by a roomful of computers or whatever, simulates the sense of “presence” you get in a haunted house. But it’s not the whole story. It’s just another one of the rational explanations we have to be aware of. Another mine in the minefield.’

Merrily sat back, relieved. She might have guessed he’d know about it all: he subscribed to dozens of scientific and esoteric journals; his library filled four rooms of his rectory.

‘Superficially, it’s a fast-changing world, Merrily.’ He brushed crumbs from his shirt-front. ‘Your feller’s right: we’re surrounding ourselves wi’ transmitters and receivers. We’ve got CCTV in every town centre, scores of techno-industries competing to sell us bits of tat that do some meaningless trick the only point of which is that the last bit of tat couldn’t do it. And nobody really wants to tell us what it’s all doing to our brains, else that’s another industry gone to the wall. Oh aye, I’m perfectly willing to believe that a certain configuration of signals and electromagnetic fields in a small area is likely to set up a… what was it?’

‘Hot spot.’

‘However, once you start spreading these stories, the centuries drop away and you get into an essentially medieval situation. We’re every bit as impressionable as folk were then. This gets around, there’ll be five times as many people think they’ve got a brain tumour when it’s only a headache. Five times as many kids who think they’ve got company at night when it’s only a bad dream or headlights on the window pane. And if the rector’s as unapproachable as you say, who else do they go to with their fears?’

‘So why…’ She hesitated. ‘Why have you come, Huw?’

He dunked his biscuit. ‘Merrily, if you think I know what I’m doing, you’re wrong. If you think I’m a balanced, laid-back old bugger, wi’ a steady finger on the pulse, you’re wrong again. You don’t know owt about me, really.’

‘So tell me.’

‘Bag of nerves? Bubbling cauldron of hatred and regrets? Oh aye. I reckon I’ve had a hatred of God, sometimes, as strong as anybody alive.’

‘And Donna Furlowe?’ Merrily said. ‘Who is she?’

Silence.

‘You remembered the name,’ Huw said.

‘Only from when you said it earlier. Who is she?’

‘She isn’t,’ Huw said. ‘Any more.’

And Jane, listening at the door, crept away. Thrown by that sentence. I reckon I’ve had a hatred of God, sometimes, as strong as anybody alive.

The things the clergy said sometimes, usually only to other clergy. She didn’t know Huw Owen very well, suspected nobody did, really. She’d still been a kid when Mum had first met him, last year. Oh yeah, still a kid last year: she understood that now.

Jane went up to her apartment and sat on the bed. Probably Mum would be shouting up for her soon. Flower, I’m really sorry about this, but how would feel about going to the chippy? Always chips these days, since she’d got bogged down with this thing at Underhowle. And now Huw Owen was involved, which meant it was serious – something Huw didn’t think a woman could handle, because he was from Yorkshire.

And sometimes he hated God. And when Yorkshiremen said hated, there were no two ways about it. If God existed, it must be rough to have nobody who really liked you, nobody who actually trusted you not to shaft them in the end. Jane looked up at the ceiling, and she began to giggle with sheer, sour despair.

You poor, all-powerful, sad git.

‘I knew her mother, you see,’ Huw said.

Merrily sat down. Huw was looking down at his fingers on the table. He’d pushed his mug away, and then the biscuits.

‘Her mother lived in Brecon. Julia. A white settler in Mid- Wales. She were everything I didn’t like. Well-off. Widow of a bloke who ran a company that did up old country properties and flogged ’em off to folk like themselves – rich and rootless, desirous of a slice of countryside, a view they could own. Julia had a lovely farmhouse, down towards Bwlch, and she worshipped at Brecon Cathedral.’

Merrily suspected Huw was a socialist of the old, forgotten kind; his contempt for the former Bishop of Hereford, Mick Hunter, and Hunter’s New Labour friends was memorable. He leaned back. The lamplight made his skin look like sacking.

‘I went into the cathedral one afternoon. August 1993, this’d be. Funny, really – I hadn’t intended to go in at all. I were going for groceries at Kwiksave, only the pay-and-display were full – height of summer, hordes of tourists. I weren’t up for carrying a bloody great box about half a mile, so I decided to come back later. Parked up by the cathedral. Popped in, the way you do. Or, in my case, the way you don’t, not often. And there was this woman near the back, very quietly in tears.’ He looked across at Merrily. ‘Some of ’em, they make a big deal out of it – you know that. They want a sympathetic priest to come over: There, there, what’s the problem? This one was quite the opposite: private tears. You wouldn’t notice, unless you were a bloke on his own, thinking, What the bloody hell have I come in here for?’

It was true. A cathedral was the last place you’d expect to find Huw – he might run into a bishop.

‘I left her alone. How she wanted it, you could tell. Stayed well away, said nowt, walked out.’

Merrily was picturing Brecon Cathedral: dusky pink stone on the shaded edge of town, near what was left of the castle. Unlike most cathedrals, it was a very quiet place, usually.

‘Anyroad, I sat on the grass, outside. Very warm day. Birdsong. Very near fell asleep. Didn’t notice her until she were coming past, not looking at me, like I were some owd vagrant. I opened me eyes, and before I could think about it, I just said, “Tell me to sod off, lass, if you like…” ’

Merrily was shaking her head. Who could resist that one? It was no big surprise to learn that, about fifteen minutes later, Huw and Julia Furlowe had been having afternoon tea together in a café in The Watton.

Her daughter was missing, this was it. Her only child, Donna, had just finished her final year at Christ College, Brecon, and was due to go up to Oxford in October. Meanwhile, she’d had a summer holiday job at a country hotel in the Cotswolds, up near Stroud. Although this was over two hours from home, and Donna had to stay there, it was a good arrangement because the proprietors of the hotel were family friends who would keep an eye on her. She was eighteen but, to be honest, her mother admitted, in some ways immature.

And now she was missing. She’d gone shopping in Cheltenham, getting a lift with the cook, arranging to meet him at a car park at four-thirty p.m. But when the cook came to collect his car, ten minutes later than arranged, she wasn’t there. When she didn’t show up after an hour, the cook called the hotel to find out if she’d made her own way back. When nobody had heard from her by nine that night, they first called Julia and then they called the police.

Three weeks now, and nothing. No sightings. Well, Cheltenham in August, what could you expect? Besides, missing eighteen-year-old girls, it wasn’t all that unusual. Not in the summertime. Try not to worry too much, they said.

But Julia knew that something must have happened. They were close, she and Donna, always had been, especially since Tim had died, so suddenly – never any suspicion that there was anything wrong with his heart; he’d still been playing rugby at forty-eight.

Couldn’t Donna have fallen in love – whirlwind holiday romance, gone off with him, the way young girls did? Absolutely out of the question. Was it possible Donna might have been unhappy about going to Oxford, felt unable to confide this to her mother? No, no, no. How could she be so sure? Because they were close. Truly, truly close.

The Brecon and Radnor Express had carried the story; Huw must have missed it. Julia Furlowe went to the Cathedral every day, to pray; Huw wouldn’t have known, hadn’t been near the place in weeks.

Middle of the following week, he’d driven Julia down to Stroud and Cheltenham and they’d done the rounds with colour photographs. Have you seen this girl? You wouldn’t forget, if you had – lovely girl, soft ash-blonde hair.

Like her mother: Julia Furlowe, forty-nine, a widow for six years, one daughter, missing. A soft-spoken southerner, exiled in Wales. Alone now in a luxury farmhouse with a view down the Usk, where she painted local views in watercolour and gouache, very accomplished, and sold them in the local craft shops.

‘And I held back,’ Huw said. ‘As you would in a situation like that. Held back a long time. Longer than she were inclined to. Separate rooms, the first three trips. By the fourth, it seemed ridiculous. We’d prayed together every night, always went to the nearest church and prayed together. Knelt together and prayed to God, for Donna to be all right.’

Merrily met Huw’s eyes; his face was pale and roughened in the feeble light: sackcloth and ashes.

‘We never lived together. I’d spend a couple of nights at her place at Bwlch, either side of Sunday. What a strange bloody time that were. Love and sadness. Love and anxiety. Love and stress, love and desperation. We used to tell each other how it would be when Donna turned up. Happen wi’ a babby – Julia were ready for that… that would’ve been just fine. I used to think, I wonder what she’s like when she’s really smiling… smiling from the heart, without reservation?’

They spent Christmas together. Christmas 1993, the first Christmas there’d been no Donna. Christmas morning, Julia came to Huw’s church, up in the Beacons. The locals knew by now, knew who she was but said nowt. A farmer’s wife said she was glad for them, glad for Huw – a minister up here, all alone, it had never seemed right. Julia had cried a lot, that night.

The next day, she started a painting, of the snow on Pen- y-fan and then abandoned it, saying she had to get home – what if Donna had come back? What if she was coming back for New Year? Donna always loved New Year, more than Christmas as she’d got older.

Donna didn’t come back for New Year.

It was sometime towards the end of February when Huw went over to Julia’s place, picking up her paper, as usual, at the shop in Bwlch, tossing it down on the long coffee table in the vast stone sitting room.

And Julia had glanced at it and then picked it up and – he’d never forget this as long as he bloody lived – Julia had held the paper at arm’s length, feeling in the pocket of her denim frock for her reading glasses.

And she’d said, almost vaguely, she’d said:

‘That’s Fred.’

A long moment, because Huw had read the story by then and thought nothing of it except his usual tired disgust, and Julia hadn’t the faintest idea what it was about, she’d just seen the picture. Some nights, even now, Huw would lie in bed, hearing her voice on the north-east wind from Pen-y-fan: That’s Fred… that’s Fred… that’s Fred…

‘He’d worked a couple of times for her husband,’ Huw said. ‘Years before – before they’d come to Wales. When Donna was a little girl. When they were living at Highnam, near Gloucester. You never forgot Fred – such a cheerful little man, and a hell of a good worker. Nowt he wouldn’t turn his hand to, Fred. And always a smile for you. Always a smile for a lady. And a big grin for little Donna.’

Huw’s eyes were like glass. ‘Oh dear God,’ Merrily said.

‘That were early days – the first bodies had been found at 25 Cromwell Street: Fred’s daughter Heather and two other girls, Shirley and Alison. Within a week or so, he’s confessed to nine more murders, and the whole bloody nation’s agog. By April they’re exploring two fields on the border of Much Marcle and Kempley. Digging up his first wife, Rena. Two months later, Ann McFall in Fingerpost Field.’

‘You went to the police…’

‘Oh aye. Like the relatives of every other missing girl within a hundred miles of Gloucester. And when it come out that Fred had worked for Tim Furlowe, that he knew Tim’s family… See, all these girls – they weren’t random kidnaps, he knew ’em all, before. Even Lucy Partington, the undergraduate, who seemed like a random snatch off the street, there’s evidence he knew her slightly, way back. “It’s me? Don’t you recognize me – worked for your dad?” ’

‘But if Donna was just a child…?’

‘The feeling was it happened the other way round. Donna bumps into him in the street, in Cheltenham. He was always in Cheltenham. Well, not a face you ever forgot, West. Do anything for you.’

A soundtrack was playing in Merrily’s head. Traffic and the bustle and chatter of a summer pavement and… ‘Oh, gosh, it’s Fred! I bet you don’t remember me. Donna Furlowe?’ ‘Course I do, Donna, well, well, well… Give you a lift somewhere? The ole van’s just round the corner.’

Huw leaned his head forwards, digging his fingers into the skin of his forehead. When he looked up, there were red marks.

‘That was when the police asked me if I knew of any satanic groups. I didn’t, so I went round all the local Deliverance priests. Took some leave from the parish. Stayed in Gloucester for over a month, me and Julia. No more bodies, but they always expected to find more. But I think it was Lucy Partington did it for Julia. Not like the others – an intelligent, cultured girl. Found in Cromwell Street, with tape around the skull, bits of rope. Evidence of— You don’t want to hear this, lass, I don’t want to tell you.’

‘She was Martin Amis’s cousin, wasn’t she? The novelist.’

‘Aye. Cultured lass. Artistic. Sensitive. So the cops are saying now to West, what about Donna Furlowe? Where did you bury Donna Furlowe? He denies it. He always denied it. Just like he denied murdering Ann McFall – buried her, but he didn’t kill her. He loved her, she was his angel – just let him bloody find out who killed her, that’s all… He lied, you see, Merrily, he lied all along. And all the time, I’m saying to Julia, “It’s coincidence. Coincidence, that’s all, let’s go home.” She wouldn’t.’

‘I wouldn’t, either, if it had been…’ Merrily swallowed. She found she was holding a hand to the neck of her black woollen jumper. She wanted to get up and make more tea, but she couldn’t move.

‘We did leave in the end,’ Huw said. ‘We had to. I had to go back to the parish, and the Deliverance courses were about to get started. But it were never the same after that. I’d go over to Bwlch every other day. Stay the odd night. She’d keep saying, “I can’t settle, Shep, I can’t settle.” Always called me Shep. Said I reminded her of a border collie, always ready, always on watch.’

‘Yes.’

Another Christmas. A couple of dozen half-finished paintings. Then a week later, New Year’s Day 1995, Fred West, awaiting trial for a dozen murders, constructed a rope out of shirts – always a practical man – and hanged himself in his cell at Winson Green. Having told his carer he’d killed a lot more girls. As many as twenty more girls. No names.

‘It were summer again before we knew it. This was when Julia told me about the medium in Brecon. I’d asked her to marry me by then, she said let’s leave it a year, see how things are. And that she’d been to a bloody medium.’

It’s understandable. Kind of situation that sends most people to mediums.’

‘I know that, lass. And all I could do was beg her not to. You know the shite that comes through at these bloody sessions… not to be trusted, mediums, not ever. We had a row. I didn’t see her for a week. I went back, crawling, beginning of August 1995, and stayed the night, and when we got up the next morning there was a call from a copper in Gloucester to say they’d found a female body, butchered, in field near Lydbrook, in the Forest of Dean.’

Merrily tried to say something, couldn’t. She hadn’t known, hadn’t recognized the name.

‘We saw some of the clothes. She were still wearing clothes, but there were thick brown parcel-tape round the lower part of the skull.’

‘Huw…’

‘And bones missing. Finger bones and foot bones.’

Merrily’s nails pierced her palms.

‘See, we’d read it all by then. Hundreds of pages already in the papers, books being written, Rose coming up for trial on ten murder charges. She must’ve known… Oh aye, we all knew by then exactly what Fred West did to his victims, him and Rose. We knew all the details. Fred abusing his children and watching Rose with other men, through a hole in the door. Taking in girls, at first, who were up for it – they thought, but not the things Fred and Rose did, nobody were up for that. Then girls who weren’t up for it, Fred and Rose getting off on the fear.’

And she heard him at Frannie Bliss across the table: cellars and concrete… dreams full of blood and filth and sobbing.

‘Can I tell you what it were like for Julia, then, Merrily? Can I start to tell you?’

‘No need.’

‘Course not. She started painting again, within days. Painting Donna, from photographs. But very pale. Paintings you could see the white paper through, like she was trying to clean off the child’s body. I tried to get her to come to the cathedral. She ‘wouldn’t. But she was still going to the medium. What could I say about that? I couldn’t bring her comfort, the Church couldn’t do owt.’

Huw was feeling in an inside pocket of his tweed jacket, bringing out what looked like an old tobacco pouch of yellow plastic. He unwrapped it and took out a small piece of folded paper. Thick paper, quality notepaper. He unfolded it and passed it across the table to Merrily. She took it to the lamp.

I’ll keep it short, Shep.

I’m so, so sorry about this. But I do believe there is somewhere else – you showed me that – and that Donna needs me there now. She so needs someone to comfort her, I feel this very strongly. I’m so very sorry, because I love you so much, Shep, you know I do, and it’s only thinking of you and sensing your arms around me that’s going to give me the last bit of strength I need for this, so please don’t take your arms away and please, please forgive me, and please go on praying for us. I’m so SORRY.

Merrily stood there by the lamp, holding the paper, feeling its texture, the weight of it. Paper made to last. She was thinking of all those times she’d wondered if there had ever been a woman in Huw’s life.

When he started to speak again, she couldn’t look at him.

‘It were me found her. I think that was what she wanted. Thought I were strong. Owd Shep. Seen it all. She’d left the farmhouse doors unlocked. Lovely balmy summer’s evening, and an overdose of sleeping tablets.’

‘Huw, I…’ Blinking back the tears; that wouldn’t help.

‘God?’ His voice was down on the flagstones. ‘I went into me own church that night and screamed obscenities at God for the best part of an hour. Close as I’ve ever been to chucking it in. They say it makes your faith stronger in the end, and happen they’re right, but you can’t possibly know that at the time. It’s not a time when faith makes any kind of bloody sense.’

No.’

She had to put the paper down. Wondering if he’d brought it tonight specially to show her, or if he carried it with him all the time, in his inside pocket next to his heart, the suicide note of a woman he’d never really had and perhaps was already losing when she died. ‘

36 Dying of Guilt

‘AND YOU KNOW the joke?’ Huw said.

‘There’s a joke?’

With the lights of Hereford city centre clustered in the rear- view mirror, Merrily headed left by the Belmont roundabout, finding the Ross road. They were going to make a surprise call on the Reverend Jerome Banks. Huw’s idea. Huw sat placidly in the passenger seat, wearing his donkey jacket, hands clasped on his knees, no seat belt on. Wears his scar tissue like a badge. No, not like a badge at all. Like scar tissue, the kind that was never less than inflamed. She was glad she no longer had to look into his stricken eyes.

‘The joke, Merrily, was that it’s possible Donna wasn’t down to West after all. ‘The bones – aye that matched. Otherwise, a few differences. The Home Office pathologist were the first to question it. He knew the West style by then, see.’

‘What kind of differences?’

‘Well, there were nowt wrong with the hole. West used to bury them in holes that were deeper than they were wide. They weren’t graves, they were holes. Practical. Like you’d have for dead sheep.’ Huw’s voice was as flat as the road ahead. ‘Nobody had ever just stumbled on one of Fred’s bodies. He’d cut them up, then bury them neatly. Efficient butchery, economical disposal.’

‘Thank you, I’ve read about that.’

And Donna had been cut up, but with no great skill. The head… hacked off, the legs broken. The hands, too. One foot mutilated, bones removed. But not Fred’s way, was how the pathologist saw it. Too rough, he figured, therefore too frenzied.’

But after Donna had been in the ground for the best part of two years, Huw said, there was no strong forensic evidence either way – not much more than the pathologist’s feeling that this wasn’t down to Fred.

‘You can bet most of the coppers wanted it to be him, mind. You don’t want more than one of these buggers, do you? Not on the same patch. So whatever investigation there was must’ve been cursory, wi’ over seventy per cent of the team convinced the case was already solved. Always somebody to say, Oh, happen Fred were in a hurry this time, not his usual self… especially under the circumstances.’

‘Circumstances?’ Down the Callow pitch now, and off into the country, reminding her of that night with Gomer, when it all began, experiencing again that feeling of being drawn in.

‘He’d just had a rather difficult year, Merrily. One of his kids had told a schoolfriend about the domestic arrangements at 25 Cromwell Street, and Fred had found himself in Gloucester court facing charges of tampering with a daughter. Three counts of rape, one of buggery. Rose next to him, accused of cruelty and complicity. Police and social services walking all over the beloved home, kids taken into care. So then Fred has to discuss his married life in detail with the coppers – “My wife and I, we leads a very full sex life.” Nudge bloody nudge.’

‘They got off, though, didn’t they?’

‘Aye. So near and yet so far. In the end, the victim wouldn’t give evidence. Nobody would. Nobody wanted to break up the happy home. So they got off, the pair of ’em – embracing in the dock, picture of bloody innocence.’

But the police had been inside number 25, seen all the signs – the sex aids, the pornographic home-videos. And, while the other children were in care, the social workers had heard the ‘family jokes about Heather, who was missing (run off with a lesbian, Fred said), being buried under the patio. It was the beginning of the end. Within nine months they’d arrested him for the murder of Heather, buried more or less where she was said to be buried. Not a very good joke any more.

So did Fred realize the clock was ticking? Was he determined to get a last one in before the bells went off? Or did he just happen to run into Donna in Cheltenham and couldn’t resist?

Or did somebody else kill her?

‘You think Donna might’ve been killed by Roddy Lodge, don’t you? That was what you told Bliss. And it’s no wonder Frannie’s excited. Because if this was down to Lodge, it proves that we’re not just looking at another copycat,’ Merrily said.

‘No.’

‘Because, while it might not have been a perfect match, it was still very close to West’s modus operandi, including the bones. And when poor Donna was buried, two years before the arrest and all the publicity, the only way anyone could possibly have known about West’s modus operandi would have been by actually knowing West.’

‘There we are, then,’ Huw said placidly.

So Huw had come to take over, AGENDA written now in neon capitals between the lines on his forehead. Huw was running a crusade on behalf of the parents of all them dead and missing girls, lying awake night after night wondering precisely what were done to their kids and how many times.

Or just for one parent, one girl.

Or just – God forbid – for his own redemption.

Now Huw wanted to talk to the Reverend Jerome Banks, to whom Roddy Lodge had gone with his haunted-bungalow stories and been turned away. Why? And why had Banks offloaded the funeral so fast? Why had he really done that? Huw wanted answers. Huw Owen, with his wolfhound hair and his slow-burn stare.

Scary.

Before they left, Merrily had gone up to the apartment, with the chip money in one hand – Jane, at seventeen, was becoming what in Liverpool they used to call a latchkey kid. This couldn’t go on.

‘Flower, Huw and I have… someone to see.’

‘Wow,’ Jane said in her most bored tone. ‘Really?’

‘Shouldn’t take long, but—’

‘Yeah, yeah, chips’ll be fine.’

‘Unless you want to come along? We could call somewhere for a meal afterwards.’

Jane had turned down the stereo and stared at Merrily, with that awful twisted little smile. ‘Let me get this right. You’re offering me a night out with a couple of vicars talking shop. Discussing like God’s Work.’ The kid had sighed, shaking her head in slow motion. ‘Merrily, if you only knew how distressingly patronizing that sounded.’

‘You used to be quite interested in… aspects of the job.’

‘Interests change,’ Jane said. ‘Or maybe we get people wrong. Like, for quite a while, I thought my mother had a normal interest in men.’

‘Now what does that mean?’

Jane had shrugged.

They passed a pub on the Ross road called, with an awful irony, The Axe and Cleaver.

‘If there ever is evidence that Lodge killed Donna,’ Merrily said, ‘what could that mean? It would seem to me to suggest there really might have been a group of them.’

‘Aye. The cult that Fred talked about, and everybody thought he were just trying to spread the blame. However, when all’s said and done, if Roddy Lodge killed Donna he didn’t kill Julia. Fred killed Julia.’

‘You mean just the thought of…?’

‘The thought of Fred and Rose and what they’d done to the others. The images of his hands on Donna. Julia was an artist. She couldn’t live with the images.’

‘I’m so sorry, Huw.’

‘Been dreaming about her again, Merrily. Julia and her white portraits of Donna. Keep seeing the white portraits. I’ve got one at home. I don’t think she’s at peace. I don’t think either of them are at peace.’

‘No.’

‘And West’s still killing,’ Huw said. ‘He always has been. You read about his grown-up children attempting suicide. And a man called Terry Crick: in January 1996, he attached a hose to his car exhaust and killed himself with carbon monoxide… couldn’t live with the thought that he might’ve stopped it. They were mates, you see, back in the late sixties – young Terry, bit of a hippy then, and genial young Fred. Do anything for you, Fred. Showed Terry his abortion tools once. Very proud of his abortion tools, was Fred. Loved to tell women that if they ever needed help that way, he was their man. Terry thought it were a joke.’

‘Huw—’

‘Until, years later, when he read about the case and remembered staying with the Wests when they were in a caravan near Cheltenham, hearing Fred and Rose giggling in bed… became convinced he must’ve heard future murders being conceived. Didn’t go to the police until it were too late. Couldn’t go on living with the thought that he might’ve prevented something. People have been dying of guilt, Merrily. I doubt it’d’ve made any difference at all if Terry Crick had told the cops about Fred West waving his abortion tools around. Just having a laugh, Fred would’ve said. Mucky owd tools like that, who’d believe it…? Why’ve you stopped?’

Merrily wrenched up the handbrake and switched off the engine. ‘I was trying to tell you – Banks’s rectory is up that lane on the left, I think. You still want to go?’

‘Of course I still want to go. Be some guilt there, I reckon, don’t you? Let’s go and help Mr Banks get it off his chest.’

They were parked with two wheels on the verge, at the side of the A49, the old Volvo shaded by high bushes still heavy with sodden leaves. Merrily said quietly, ‘One more time – what are you doing here, Huw?’

Never before, in all the hours she’d spent with him, had she felt the quiver of instability that was now so real it was almost shaking the car.

‘Covering me back,’ he said. ‘Put it like that if you want. Call it selfishness. Call it me not wanting to take any guilt to my grave if more lives get lost.’

‘Why should more get lost?’

Huw leaned back against the passenger door. ‘If there’s a group of people out there still, and they’re taking lives or harming folk in any way, it’s a police matter. If there’s a spiritual evil, it’s ours. Accepted?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘I don’t know anything about Lodge – yet. But I know a lot about West. A man driven by lust. An uneducated man who arranged his life around the constant need for sexual pleasure. No moral values, no sense of remorse. Not a hint of basic decency. A man who watched through holes in doors, who had sex with his own kids because they were there. In his house. His house. The house he’d converted with his own tools. A man who loved nobody, yet loved things. Tools, gadgets. A man who possessed.’

‘Huw—’ Merrily wound down the window. She wanted both fresh air and a cigarette.

‘And what’s changed, Merrily? He might’ve gone, physically, but how many people have died since?’

‘Because the lamp of the wicked must be put out.’ Cold air on her face. ‘That’s why you’re here. You’ve come with a view to snuffing out his lamp, haven’t you?’

‘Start the car,’ Huw said roughly. ‘Let’s go and see this bugger Banks.’

Dressed for dinner, in a dark wool jacket over a white blouse, her features sharp with suspicion, Mrs Pawson was scanning the reception area at the Royal Hotel for whoever had put out the call.

Lol stood up and walked over to her. He didn’t have the smallest idea how he was going to handle this but, on the night before his first gig in nearly two decades, fear was relative.

‘What do you want?’ Mrs Pawson’s voice was hard and brittle as dried nail varnish. She was flicking glances to either side of him, probably to see if there was anyone around she could call on if he attacked her.

‘Have you…?’ Lol looked around too, saw two elderly women, nobody else. ‘Could you spare a few minutes?’

Mrs Pawson didn’t move. ‘What’s this about?’

‘It’s about Lodge,’ Lol admitted. ‘I’ve not been able to stop thinking about what you said this morning, and I’m sorry, but I think there was more you weren’t saying.’

‘And are you, in fact, something to do with the police?’

Though aware that Mrs Pawson’s general experience of the drainage trade would not predispose her to be generous or open, he still shook his head.

‘In that case,’ she said, ‘I do not want to speak to you. That man caused enough damage. I don’t want to discuss him. You’d better go.’

Lol nodded and had half turned away, to leave, when he suddenly turned back. He’d thought about this a lot after returning to the studio, rehearsing a couple of songs in a desultory kind of way, finding that even at the eleventh hour his heart wasn’t in it. Mrs Pawson had been perhaps the last person to have any business dealings with Lodge, and she was a woman on her own and something was not right.

‘You mentioned another woman,’ he said. ‘When you said Roddy Lodge was a nightmare person, I didn’t think you were talking about getting conned over a septic tank. And then you mentioned a woman.’

And then he told her that he’d been there when Lodge had died, standing underneath that pylon. And that something like this didn’t just go away. He told her he didn’t normally work with Gomer Parry and was just helping out because Gomer had had a lot of trouble that he didn’t imagine Mrs Pawson even knew about as it hadn’t exactly been national news. And then he told her he and Gomer were both friends of the church minister who’d landed the job of burying Lodge.

He shook his shoulders helplessly and told her what a small county it was. He apologized to her again.

Mrs Pawson looked him in the eyes. ‘You don’t give up, do you?’

‘Usually, yes,’ he said, ‘to be honest.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Robinson. Laurence Robinson. If you don’t want to talk to me, what about Merrily Watkins?’

‘The priest?’

‘I could probably arrange that. Maybe I could bring her here.’

She stared at him. ‘Why do you think I’d want to talk to a priest?’

‘I was thinking maybe a woman. The woman who found the body in the shovel of Lodge’s digger after he…’

It was this that seemed to do it.

Jerome Banks’s study had Ordnance Survey maps on the walls, with coloured drawing pins marking his churches. It was next to the living room and you could hear the sound of the TV through the wall. His wife was sitting in there. He’d told her not to bother with refreshment; this wouldn’t take long.

Jerome was irritated by their visit and was making no effort to conceal it.

‘My day off,’ he said. ‘Always take every second Tuesday off, everyone knows that.’

The wrong attitude to take with Huw, tonight.

‘Creature of habit, eh?’

‘Something wrong with that? I’ve always found people like to know where they are with their clergy.’

‘No mysteries,’ Huw said.

None here, Merrily thought. The rectory was a modern house on the edge of a small estate of neo-Georgian detached homes west of Ross. There was a cold street lamp outside the study window. Only one hardwood chair in front of the desk, and he’d made Merrily sit in it, and she felt very small but aware that this probably wasn’t going to be her showdown.

Jerome Banks surveyed Huw, both of them standing up. They were about the same height, but Banks held himself straighter. Military backbone. His checked shirt was crisply ironed, and you could have sliced bread with the creases of his trousers. ‘We met before?’ He had stiff, sandy hair and a nose with a small red bump on the tip, like a bell push.

‘Can’t see it, somehow,’ Huw said.

‘No. If you’re who I think you are, I agree it’s unlikely. And if you’ve come about what I think you’ve come about, I doubt there’s much I can say to assist you.’

‘What would that be?’

‘You tell me, Mr Owen.’

‘Well, like a lot of people, including the police, I’m becoming a little concerned about events in and around the village of Underhowle. And in my experience it’s always best to have a chat with the lad on the ground. We don’t stick our noses in much these days, the clergy, but there’s not much we don’t at least hear about.’

‘Some of us stick our noses in further than others,’ Banks said.

‘Agreed. How long have you got before retirement, Jerome?’

Banks coloured. ‘Obviously, Owen, I’ve heard about you and your little Deliverance empire. Your incantations and your Thermos flasks of holy water, your new medievalism. And, yes, you’re quite right. I don’t have long before retirement – eighteen months at the most – and I don’t intend to spend any of that time kow-towing to the charismatics and the damn happy-clappies!’

Merrily smiled.

Huw scowled. ‘I don’t clap much, pal. And I’m not happy.’

‘What do you want?’

‘I want to know about a few of the incidents that’ve been brought to your notice but which you haven’t felt inclined to do owt about, being as how you’re not into new medievalism.’

Merrily sat still and said nothing. She just wouldn’t have dared…

‘I don’t even know what you’re talking about,’ Banks said, but he’d left too long a pause. ‘If you think I’ve been “got at” over the Lodge funeral, I can show you two dozen letters and a small petition, all of them urging me not to bury Lodge at Underhowle, and no letters at all in support.’

‘Urging?’ Merrily said. ‘No threats, then? I’ve had a threat.’ Huw looked at her. ‘Had an anonymous phone call warning me to stay at home on Friday.’

‘You never said owt about that,’ Huw said. ‘You told the police?’

‘As the funeral’s now tomorrow, I didn’t think it really applied.’

‘If anyone had threatened me,’ Banks said, ‘I should have made a point of personally digging the grave.’

‘Why did you suggest Merrily for the job?’

Banks waited a couple of seconds. ‘Did I suggest her?’

‘Somebody did.’

‘Perhaps because her name had already been mentioned in connection with Lodge?’

Huw nodded, letting the silence hang until Merrily began to feel uncomfortable.

‘Look,’ Banks said, ‘I’m aware that there’s a particular local activist in the Underhowle area with a chip on his shoulder about high-voltage power lines and pylons being detrimental to health and possibly causing some people to have… odd experiences. I don’t necessarily subscribe to any of that and if I did, I should be obliged to conclude that it wasn’t a matter at all for the Church – not even your particular outpost.’

‘Aha,’ Huw said.

‘You’ve had reports of odd experiences?’ Merrily said.

‘As you know, people often say things they have difficulty justifying.’ Banks was gazing over Merrily’s head at his own and Huw’s reflections in the window. ‘Often because they want rehousing. A better house. Think we’re all idiots.’

‘This is hauntings?’ Huw asked.

‘As there are usually also physical symptoms, I’ve tended to refer people to the doctor.’

‘He cure them?’

‘I’ve no idea. I have heard of some people going to so-called alternative practitioners in Ross and Hereford. The very people to deal with their alternative problems. It’s nothing to do with religion.’

‘And that’s what you said to Lodge, eh?’

The tip of Banks’s nose went white. ‘How bloody dare you—’

‘Look!’ Merrily stood up. She was getting tired of breaking up Huw’s fights. ‘Mr Banks, you might not think much of what we do – or try to do – but if there’s a remote possibility that it helps people to cope, we’ll just… we’ll muddle on, if you don’t mind. If I told you what this was really about, you probably wouldn’t thank me. And call me overzealous, but I kind of like to know exactly who I’m burying. Isn’t that the most important thing we ever do for someone?’

‘Are you trying to tell me my job?’

‘Not your job any more,’ Huw said. ‘You unloaded it. Be interesting to know why.’

‘You know why – matter of local politics.’

‘So you ignored all the other complaints of psychic intrusion for purely political reasons, and not wanting to encourage happy-clappy hysteria.’

‘You bastard.’

Huw beamed. ‘That’s the first perceptive deduction you’ve made all night, pal.’

‘Look,’ Merrily said, ‘we all appreciate that we – the clergy – come from different directions… which is healthy. And we’re not trying to cause trouble, Mr Banks. We’d just like to be able to work out what we’re dealing with. A bit of background – in confidence – would help.’

She watched Banks contemplating this, working out where he stood.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘And this is political. One complaint concerned the old Baptist chapel.’

‘The one more or less adjacent to Lodge’s garage.’

‘Disused. Previously used as a bottling plant for spring water, which failed. Now being converted into a museum, or some sort of visitor centre. But still a Baptist chapel in my eyes, and I don’t intrude on other denominations.’

‘You were told the place was haunted?’

‘I was told of disturbances, but some looked to me to be of distinctly human origin. For instance, the firm working on the conversion had complained of equipment going missing. Nothing supernatural there. Probably find the items in various garages in Goodrich Close.’

‘And that was it?’

‘Oh, the usual: noises, smells. I suggested they had the drains examined for blockages. Suggested they…’ Banks smirked ‘… hired Lodge to look into it. In fact, I believe he owned the chapel at one time. Came with the garage. All part of the bottling enterprise, which I gather failed because of impurities in the spring water.’

‘And did they hire him?’ Merrily asked.

‘I don’t know. The Development Committee had obtained some sort of grant to buy the property from Lodge. I… don’t really know. I do know that one building firm apparently refused to work there after a while. You’d have to ask Mrs Sollars about that; she’s supposed to be in charge there.’

‘Erm… When we spoke on the phone a few nights ago, you said Roddy Lodge came to you with a problem, the details of which you seemed to have difficulty remembering.’

‘He was—’

‘Barking, you said. Lodge told you he was seeing images of women in his new bungalow. Which I understand from relatives was nothing very new for him. When he was a child, he seems to have created projections of his dead mother – or mother-substitutes. Comfort projections. Maybe you or I wouldn’t have been able to see them, but it was all very real to him. And when he moved into the bungalow, the images – hallucinations, whatever – obviously intensified, whether through environmental effects, or… Anyway, they seem to have acquired a different… status. And this was what he told you about, wasn’t it?’

Banks turned away, stood thinking. Then he went to sit behind his desk. There was a regimental photo on it: Banks and fellow officers either side of an armoured car.

‘It disgusted me,’ he said. ‘And after half a lifetime in the Army, as you can imagine, I’m not easily disgusted.’

‘He told you about having sexual fantasies involving women who were now dead.’

‘Yes.’

‘How long ago was this?’

‘About two years ago.’

‘Did he just show up and ask to talk to you?’

‘No, he… I don’t know whether I should be telling you this, but he was more or less referred to me. By his GP. Dr Ruck.’

‘This is the same man you refer people to when they complain of nocturnal apparitions or whatever?’

‘He’d gone to Allan Ruck with general complaints of debilitation, headaches, muscle pains. And then he’d starting talking about all this psychic malarkey. I believe Allan eventually sent him to a brain specialist, but of course they couldn’t find anything. After that he could only suggest a psychiatrist. Lodge reacted somewhat aggressively to this. Ruck said, then why don’t you go and see the rector?’

‘Palming him off.’

‘If you like.’

‘Did nobody even consider the possibility of anomalous electrical—?’

‘And give that maniac Hall more ammunition? Anyway, how could it possibly explain the sexual fantasies?’

Huw said, ‘Electrical stimulation, if I’ve got this right, of the septum area of the brain.’

‘I think what we’re suggesting,’ Merrily said, ‘is that if someone like Roddy Lodge, who already has a well-established fantasy life, moves into what’s become known as an electromagnetic hot spot, then the foundation – the template – for sexual fantasies of a very real and intense kind is already laid. Perhaps it all became just a bit too intense. Too intense to be pleasurable, in the conventional sense. And coupled with the debilitating physical effects of electro-hypersensitivity… Well, no wonder he went to his doctor.’

The mobile shuddered in her coat pocket. She thought, Jane.

‘Tell me,’ Banks said, ‘what basic proof do you have of any of this, Mrs Watkins?’

‘None at all. When do people like us ever have proof?’ She pulled out the phone. ‘Excuse me.’

She went to stand in the doorway, remembering Banks telling her on the phone that he’d actually offered ‘prayers for the Unquiet Dead’ but Roddy Lodge had rejected the idea. Bumptious? Full of himself? Never seen the like, I wasn’t entirely sure, to tell you the truth, if he wasn’t taking the piss. It suggested that, while Roddy would have been very glad to lose the side effects, he really didn’t want to part with his ghosts, which was perhaps why he’d resisted Melanie Pullman’s efforts to get him to talk to Sam Hall.

‘This is Merrily,’ she said into the phone.

‘Where are you?’

‘Lol! I’m out near Ross.’

‘That’s brilliant. You—’

‘I’ll call you back, OK? Five minutes.’

‘So what advice did you give Roddy Lodge, Jerome?’ Huw said. ‘What did you recommend for his little problem? Cold showers?’

Banks looked down at his desk. Waited his customary two seconds before replying.

‘I believe I told him to – in the modern parlance – get a life.’

Huw smiled.

Banks didn’t. He looked at each of them in turn, as if to make sure they understood the significance of what he was about to say.

‘I suggested to Lodge that instead of following his solitary… pursuits, he might consider making the acquaintance of real girls.’ Bringing his fist down on the desktop. ‘Real girls!’ The fist coming down twice, like a mallet. ‘Now do you see?’

37 Long Old Nights

JANE HEARD THE voice from the kitchen and grinned with relief, saw herself floating in slo-mo across the room and into the scullery towards the answering machine and the phone, the light entering her eyes like turning up a dimmer switch, and then…

Then what?

‘Er, this is actually quite important,’ Eirion said, ‘so I’m going to hang on for about half a minute while you decide if you can possibly spare some time to speak to me.’

Jane didn’t move. Had to admit that what she was missing most right now was having someone she could open up to – someone she could lay her deepest, most secret fears on. Someone who knew exactly where she was coming from. And who was not her mother.

It was just that she’d been trying to avoid considering the name Eirion in this context – even though there was no one else.

Eirion said, ‘Basically, it relates to a Website I found concerning the Archangel Uriel.’

Naturally, he was uncomfortable too, after what had passed between them. He needed a pretext.

‘It’s something I thought you ought to know about. I mean, I don’t know much about this stuff, and I believe it’s very much on the iffy side of the scriptures, and with people who do Websites you get a lot of cranks and fanatics – but the site gives a list of people throughout history who it reckons have become vehicles for Uriel. Especially women. And the thing is, you seem to be one of them.’

‘Me?’ Jane said.

And simultaneously realized the truth. This wasn’t for her at all. The bastard was addressing Mum.

Jane felt cold, like marble. Wasn’t exactly the first time they’d conspired, was it?

The doorbell went. Meanwhile, the treacherous git was still waiting for someone to pick up the phone; she could hear his breathing in the speaker. Panting – overweight.

Jane straightened up, raised a stiffened forefinger at the answering machine and went to answer the door. Hoping it was Uncle Ted or someone else who she could take down with her, whose night she could ruin.

In the hall, she was about to give the finger to the The Light of the World, when she met the eyes of the guy with the lamp – saw how old he looked, noticed his crown of thorns, felt that it must actually hurt in a nagging, chronic kind of way – and didn’t give him the finger after all. It would’ve been gratuitous. She was not gratuitous.

The bell went again. Jane turned on the porch light and opened the front door.

Jenny Driscoll stood there, in a shiny waxed jacket with a white scarf half over her head, Virgin Mary-style.

Merrily felt in the driver’s-door pocket and brought out her pectoral cross. She slipped the chain over her head, under the cowl of her sweater.

‘I can’t believe we did that.’

‘Did what, lass?’

‘Good priest–bad priest.’ Her initial sense of triumph felt wrong now. She started up the car and pulled away from Jerome Banks’s executive rectory.

‘Aye,’ Huw said, ‘one so seldom gets an opportunity for such finesse.’

‘Huw, we practically bludgeoned the truth out of the poor sod!’

‘Doesn’t matter how we did it – where’s it got us, apart from a hint on the Baptist chapel? Not far. Confirms what you already knew: Lodge were a sick bugger, on a number of levels. But Banks’s professed sense of guilt – that’s half-arsed. Who’s going to believe Lodge got launched into a life of rape and murder by a man-to-man chat with the rector? I’m disappointed. I expected summat better than this.’

‘You can see why he wouldn’t want it broadcast, though.’ She braked at the poorly lit T-junction with the A49. ‘And why he didn’t want to conduct the funeral.’

‘If it were me, I’d feel bloody well obliged to conduct it.’ Huw sank back and stretched out his legs.

Merrily fumbled a Silk Cut from the packet. ‘Could you pass me the lighter from the dash, or can I use your halo?’

‘Cheeky besom.’ He found the lighter and lit her cigarette. ‘This woman we’re going to see, this is the woman whose septic tank…?’

‘… Started it all.’ The tiered skyline of Ross appeared, part- floodlit, across the dual carriageway and the Wye: the Herefordshire Riviera. Behind it was Howle Hill, the Forest, the dark country. ‘And as we don’t want to scare her, you can stay in the car.’

Mrs Jenny Box, née Driscoll said, ‘You’re not expecting her back soon at all, are you, Jane?’

‘Well, she said she—’

‘Thought not.’

Driscoll sat with her white scarf around her shoulders and the cup of weak tea Jane had made in front of her on the refectory table.

Not quite the soft touch that Jane had expected.

In fact, knowing the woman’s background, why had she expected a soft touch at all – Driscoll having come over from Ireland, worked with the hard cookies of the fashion world, the flash cynics in television. Having been married, for years, to Gareth Box.

Jane sat across the table, uncomfortable. Why hadn’t she just told the woman that Mum was out and offered to pass on a message? Instead of thinking this could be heaven-sent and saying what Gareth Box had said: she can’t be long, I suppose. Do you want to come in and wait? Getting her into the house, just the two of them, a cosy chat. This woman: Mum’s… lover?

Would-be! Would-be lover!

Oh Christ, get me out of this.

‘So, is there something you wanted to say to me, Jane?’

This soft-spoken, soft-eyed, soft-skinned woman, sitting with her soft hands, one over the other, on her lap. This very feminine woman. Very feminine, like Mum. Wasn’t one of them supposed to be kind of… butch?

Something she wanted to say? She said the first thing that came into her head. ‘The Archangel Uriel.’

‘And what about her?’ Jenny Box asked gently.

‘Her?’

‘Of the four principal archangels, Uriel is the only one sometimes perceived as female. In works of art mainly.’

‘Oh.’

‘You don’t know too much theology, do you, Jane?’

‘I know quite a lot about angels, actually. But that’s not proper theology anyway. The Bible doesn’t have very much to say about angels. And certainly not Uriel, who only shows up in the book of Esdras, in the Apocrypha – which is like a bit iffy.’

‘The Bible’s been censored more times than you or I will ever know,’ said Jenny Box. ‘Uriel’s the Divine Fire, an energy of light and summer. Of warmth. And so can only be female. Which, I suppose, was one reason she was pushed out of the picture for so long.’

Jane found she was clasping and unclasping her hands under the table. She pulled them apart. ‘So like this would be the Uriel you’re supposed to have… over the church?’

‘She told you about that?’ No expression. Not bothered.

‘She tells me everything. We’re very close. She…’ Jane hesitated. Sod it. ‘She told me about the money, too.’

‘Ah yes,’ Jenny Box said, ‘the money. Doesn’t everybody always get so excited about money?’

‘I mean, like… was it you who brought it?’

Mrs Box raised a faint eyebrow. ‘An anonymous gift is an anonymous gift, Jane. ’Twas always my feeling that all donations to the Church ought to be anonymous. Nobody can buy admission to Heaven, can they now?’

‘You’re pretty slick, really, aren’t you?’ Jane said.

Jenny Box laughed. ‘Years around TV. So hard to shed. All right, where’s your mother, really?’

Jane shrugged awkwardly. ‘Ross, I think.’

‘Underhowle?’

‘Maybe.’

‘I hoped to speak to her about that. I read all the papers. I’ve been up in London and I read all the papers on the train coming back. That’s more important than she could know – maybe what her whole life’s been leading up to, you know?’ She smiled at Jane. ‘Yes, I’m sure you do.’

‘No.’ Jane felt a slow seepage of anger. ‘No, I don’t know, actually.’

‘Oh? I thought you said she told you everything.’

‘But not as much as she tells you, evidently.’

The eyebrow went up again, like a goldfish flicking its tail.

‘You never really saw an angel at all, did you, Mrs Box?’ Jane said. Because at this stage of the game there was really nowhere else to go.

Mrs Pawson’s arms were down by her sides, stiff. Lol saw the knuckles tighten on her small, white fists. Oddly, he found he was starting to like her. She didn’t seem neurotic, she was really quite strong. She probably would have got along quite well in the country, in normal circumstances.

They were waiting in a carpeted, cream-walled passageway, people passing them on the way to dinner.

Mr Robinson, I’m not usually a wilting violet, and if I thought this might have helped someone I would have told the police. I would have made a full statement. But, as you said, he’s dead. Lodge is dead, and… oh…’

They’d both seen the discreet glint of the cross at the entrance to the passage, and Lol’s heart did what it always did when he saw Merrily for the first time, after…

He said, ‘I’ll go, shall I? Leave you to it.’

Mrs Pawson looked embarrassed. ‘No, don’t. This is becoming surreal.’

Merrily smiled, held out a hand. ‘I’m Merrily.’

A man and a woman had come out of a room to the right, and Mrs Pawson looked in through the door. ‘This is empty now. Let’s go in here.’

They followed her in, Lol shut the door behind them. It was a residents’ lounge, narrow, with pink and gold Regency-striped sofas and the same extensive view as the one from The Prospect.

‘How is this really going to help anyone?’ Lisa Pawson said.

Merrily walked to the window. ‘Wonderful view.’ There was a floodlit terrace and, in the middle distance, the lights of the traffic on the bypass. She turned to Mrs Pawson. ‘I get the feeling we’ve both had slightly disturbing experiences with Roddy Lodge. I’m supposed to be conducting his funeral, and I suspect there’s quite a lot that needs to be laid to rest.’

Mrs Pawson was holding her blouse together at the neck, as if it had suddenly gone cold in the room. ‘I was teaching in comprehensive schools for fifteen years, and I’ve seen some very distasteful things. But this… I still don’t see how it would help you to know about it?’

Merrily sat down on one of the sofas, near the window. ‘If you had a missing relative – a daughter, a sister – wouldn’t you want to know whether there’d been another Fred West at work?’

‘I mean, in some places,’ Jane said, ‘there are legends of angels being seen. Like in the local folklore. And apparitions of the ‘

Virgin and all that. But, I mean… Ledwardine? Do me a favour.’

Immediately regretting the scorn, but it was too late now.

‘You don’t believe people see angels, Jane?’ Jenny Box said. ‘Depends what you mean by angels.’ ‘Oh, I think we all know what we mean by angels.’ ‘I think I know what you mean.’ ‘I’m entirely sure of what I mean. And what I saw.’

‘What I think is that you just saw Mum. You were looking for somewhere to live – like, that bit was probably true. You were looking for somewhere to live and to like… entertain yourself. Out of sight of the media and all the London gossips. And then you saw Mum.’

‘Eventually, yes.’

‘And you fancied her,’ Jane said.

Jenny Box didn’t move, but her eyes flickered. Jane was suddenly so choked up with horror at what she’d said, mixed with rage and hurt at the possibility of it being true, that she could hardly get her breath.

‘That’s something like blasphemy, Jane.’

Jane stood up. ‘It’s true, though, isn’t it? You’ve got, like, everything – brilliant house, successful business, gorgeous husband – and you have to come here and mess with people’s lives. There’s nothing angelic in any of this. Divine fire? Like, the way I see it, there’s only one kind of divine fire as far as you’re concerned.’

Jenny Box was out of her chair now. She was very pale. Her white scarf had slipped to the flags.

Jane was in tears. It didn’t matter; she’d said it. It was out. Her eyes were wet. She wiped her sleeve across them and saw Jenny Box picking up her white scarf. Then the older woman was standing at the open kitchen door, with the table and ten feet of stone flags between them.

Jenny Box said, ‘When did you see my husband?’

‘How do you know…?’

‘He’s back in London now. We have the same houses, but we don’t live together. Did he come here?’

No.’

‘Which means you went to him.’ Jenny Box stood in the doorway, and when she spoke all that fey lilt had been punched out of her voice. ‘And did he touch you, Jane? As well as defaming me the best he could, did he touch you?’

‘What?’

‘Did you let him near you?’

Jane felt her mouth going out of shape.

‘It’s all right,’ Jenny Box said calmly. ‘I won’t distress you further. I’m going now.’

Jane came round the table, her fists clenched. When she reached the hall, Jenny Box had the front door open and was standing next to the Holman Hunt picture, half under the porch light but blocking it, so that it looked for a moment as if she was actually lit by the lantern that Christ was carrying in the picture. Her face was as white as a communion wafer. And she was muttering ‘Oh, dear God, dear God,’ and pulling her scarf over her head.

‘It was as if they wanted me to know,’ Mrs Pawson said. ‘From the first.’

‘They both came to install it?’ Lol asked.

‘It was quite a warm autumn day. She – the woman, Lynsey – was wearing a skimpy black top with nothing underneath it. Even when they were unloading the appliance from the truck, they kept touching one another all the time.’

‘What was she like?’ Merrily said.

‘Quite a big woman. Not much over medium height, but big bones. She had black, frizzy hair, dark eyes. She wasn’t particularly good-looking, but she had a sexiness about her, I suppose you’d have to call it. A sexiness that was not so much sultry as glowering. The way she moved – prowled – even when she was working, hauling these plastic pipes and equipment and… She hardly ever smiled – that was something that struck me – and when she did it wasn’t a very big smile, and… sly isn’t quite the word. It was as if she knew something you didn’t.’

Lol noticed that Mrs Pawson kept glancing at one of the table lamps as if to make sure it was still on.

‘I made the mistake of asking them in when they first arrived. They… their glances were everywhere. Looking at the furniture – which was fairly sparse at the time – not exactly admiring things, but noting them. As if they were checking if there was anything valuable. Then he asked if he could go to the lavatory, and I directed him to the downstairs washroom, but then I could hear him walking about in the bedroom overhead. Meanwhile, she started looking among the books, and she pulled one from the shelf, and she said, “John Donne – he was a sexy bugger, wasn’t he?” and gave me that half-smile. And then Lodge came back down, still smelling of that dreadful aftershave, and before they went back out, he stared at me in… I suppose a rather blatant way, and he asked me how I was getting on. Whether I was lonely without my husband. “Long nights,” he said. “Long old nights, eh?” ’

Mrs Pawson squeezed her arms together and began to rock slightly. Lol didn’t think she was aware of it.

‘At lunchtime, they would… They had a van – which she drove, because he’d brought the digger – and it was parked at the back of the house with the rear doors facing the kitchen. At lunchtime, they went into the back of the van, supposedly to eat their sandwiches, but it became obvious very quickly what they were actually doing. There was a single mattress in there. No attempt to hide it, no attempt at all to keep it quiet. In fact, they seemed to be making as much noise as they could. As if they were oblivious of everything else, like rutting animals. The van was actually creaking on its springs.’

Mrs Pawson stopped and looked at them, perhaps to make sure that they didn’t consider this was perfectly reasonable behaviour during a lunchtime break.

‘How many days did the work take?’ Lol asked. ‘The installation?’

‘Two. I’m sure it could have been done in one, but they seemed in no hurry – about anything.’

Evidently,’ Merrily said.

‘Naturally, but now I was regretting I’d ever hired him.’

‘Did you say anything to them?’

‘What was I supposed to say, without sounding middle-class and sanctimonious and… like a townie? Like some sort of buttoned-up townie who didn’t understanding country… spontaneity.’

‘What, you wondered if perhaps this was how all healthy young rural workers…?’

‘It’s not funny.’

‘No, it’s not,’ Merrily said. ‘Especially when you were on your own. It’s insulting, and it’s threatening.’

‘Anyway, on the second day, they left the back doors of the van wide open, and I assumed they really were eating their sandwiches this time, and I went out to ask… I steeled myself to go out and ask if they wanted a cup of tea. And they were both sitting there in the back of the van, naked. Well, she was, almost… she had her top off and her jeans unzipped. He was stripped to the waist, his belt undone.’

Merrily closed her eyes, shaking her head.

‘I screamed, I’m afraid. One tries to be cool in this sort of situation, but… Then Lodge laughed. He said what a hot day it was. Just cooling off, he said. I said something like, You’ll have to excuse me, and then she said, in this very low, throaty voice, “Why don’t you join us? Why don’t you join us, love? Do you good.” ’

Mrs Pawson started to cough, brought a hand to her mouth. Lol asked, ‘Can I get you a drink? Some coffee?’

‘No, thank you, I’ll be going in to dinner soon. If I can face it. So I said, very coldly, “How long will you be before you’ve finished?” I could smell the awful aftershave, and I was feeling sick. And she said, “As long as you want… as long as you can stand it.” And Lodge said, “Longer…” And he laughed. And I ran back to the house and locked the door and stood over the phone for quite a long time, wondering if I should call the police… if what they were doing – or what they’d said – constituted any kind of offence.’

‘They never came out of the van?’ Lol said.

‘No, not at this time. It could have been said that they were demonstrating nothing more than what you might call a lamentable lack of common courtesy. But there was – I really can’t tell you – an indescribable menace around them both. A quite palpable sense of something… predatory. I know people will say this is all with hindsight.’

‘What did you do?’ Merrily asked.

‘I didn’t know what to do then. I didn’t go out again. After a while, they came out of the van and simply finished the job, replacing all the soil. They didn’t come back to the house. I felt I should have gone to the police or somebody. But it would be my word against theirs. A townie, an incomer. And of course I absolutely dared not tell my husband. He never wanted that house, never really wanted to move to the country. Kept talking about, you know, living among… sheep-shaggers. I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction. The next day, I just had the locks changed – and doubled.’

‘Did you see them again?’

Mrs Pawson laughed harshly. ‘I went back to London that weekend to spend some time with our child, Gus. We have a nanny, who I’d hoped to persuade to come down here with us, so that I could continue my work – I do some proof-reading for an educational publisher – but she has a boyfriend in London, and it… Anyway, I came back on my own the following week, to meet the surveyor we’d hired, Mr Booth – who would subsequently point out the problem with the Efflapure and point me in the direction of Mr Parry. I was finding it hard to sleep, and I remember getting up in the night to go to the bathroom and get a drink, I…’ She closed her eyes for a moment, took a breath through her mouth. ‘I’m sorry, but this is absolutely the first time I’ve talked about this to anyone.’

‘Take your time,’ Merrily said.

‘The bathroom overlooks the side of the house, where the Efflapure had been installed. And when I looked down – it was about half past midnight, and a bright night, with the moon almost full – she was standing there. The woman. Standing on the lawn under one of the apple trees. Just standing there, quite relaxed, with her legs apart and her arms folded, dressed much as she had been the first time I saw her. Looking up at me with that same smile that said, I know things you don’t.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I was terribly afraid. I thought at first, Oh my God, they’re both here. They’ve come to rob me or… or worse. I got dressed in the dark, very quickly. I found the mobile phone and I keyed in 999, so that I’d just have to press the button, and then I ran into the front bedroom and looked out of the window. Went all around the upstairs, peering through windows, but there was no sign of the van or the truck or… anything. Or anyone. And when I went back to the bathroom, she… wasn’t there any more.’

Merrily said softly, almost casually, ‘When exactly was this? Do you remember?’

‘It must have been at least a week after I’d seen them. I remember there was a bill for the job – for the Efflapure – waiting behind the door when I returned from London.’

Lol looked at Merrily and saw her bite her lip.

The door of the lounge opened suddenly, and Mrs Pawson’s whole body jerked.

A man in a dark suit said cheerfully, ‘Are you all right in there? Anything I can get you?’

‘Fine,’ Mrs Pawson said. ‘Everything’s… fine.’

38 Bit Player in a Fantasy

THE ROYAL HOTEL was tucked into the side of the Ross churchyard, and they went up into it, then followed the path down towards the Plague Cross. The cross was edged with cold moonlight.

Lol said, ‘You didn’t really push her on dates.’

‘No point. I think we both knew what we might have been talking about,’ Merrily said. ‘If she knew for a fact that Lynsey Davies was dead by then, how would that help her to sleep? I slipped her a card on the way out, whispered I could maybe help if anything happened again.’

‘I don’t think she wants to go down that road. She just wants out.’

‘No wonder she’s staying in the hotel. I’m not sure I’d want to be in that house on my own, even now.’

Lol looked up at the Plague Cross. The cross itself was quite small, like a fist on the end of an upthrust arm, representing the triumph of mere survival.

‘The picture that’s coming over of Lynsey Davies is not really the image of a victim, is it?’

‘Nothing I’ve heard about her so far makes her terribly endearing,’ Merrily said. ‘Dumps her kids, probably breaks up Roddy’s relationship with someone who might have helped him and tries to lure an already nervous woman into three-in- a-van sex.’

Do you want to know more about her? Would that help?’

There was no one else in the churchyard. The street-front opposite – now mainly offices – was hushed, but the air around them was vibrant with the sharp spores of frost.

‘Lol, why aren’t you rehearsing? Why aren’t you getting an early night before the gig?’

‘Because I’d start thinking it was important. And if I start thinking it’s important, I’m… Anyway, there’s someone here, in Ross, who knew Lynsey well – someone Gomer and I met on the tank dig. If you wanted to come with me, we could maybe—’

‘I can’t. I’ve left Huw Owen in The Man of Ross, trying to find a pint and a pasty. We’re going over to Underhowle. He’s decided he wants to be involved, which is not, frankly, as reassuring as you might think.’ She looked up at the cross. ‘So this is Sam’s symbol.’

‘“The insidious wind which blows through skin and tissue and bones”.’

‘He said that?’

‘It’s the only good line in his song, and even that sounds more than a bit reminiscent of Dylan’s “Idiot Wind”.’

‘Electromagnetic waves,’ Merrily said, ‘radio waves… ghost waves… alien waves… soft porn blowing through the church steeple. It’s a wonder any of us can breathe.’

‘Prof says we’re mutating into it. One day we’ll become electric beings, just light and sparks. That’s a better line, maybe I’ll use that instead.’

Merrily said, ‘Huw wonders if there’s the remains of some satanic cult still out there. I wouldn’t know what to do about it if there was. It’s not even against the law any more.’

‘Killing people is.’

‘And the known killers are dead, so the police aren’t interested.’

‘No. Listen…’ Lol turned away from the cross. ‘There’s no good time to say this, but I don’t imagine there’ll be a better one.’

He saw her stiffen.

He said, ‘When I was here with Moira, something happened.’

Merrily said sharply, ‘No. Maybe this isn’t a good time.’

‘‘If I don’t talk about it now…’ She didn’t look at him. ‘Sam Hall was telling us about how the bodies were buried, without coffins, all that… and later Moira said she’d experienced what she described as a loathsome, curling sensation in her gut. She talked in an oblique way about evil. She—’ Lol shrugged. ‘That’s it.’

Merrily looked at him and he thought she almost smiled. ‘That’s it? That’s what you had to tell me?’

‘I know how you feel about clairvoyance. Just thought I ought to tell you about this. Even if you scoffed. But if you do accept this sort of thing, you might think she was getting it not so much from the cross and this situation as from… Sam.’

‘Lol—’

‘I’m worried about this, that’s all. Underhowle, Lodge, West. Worried about you. Sorry. Also, Eirion came to see me last night. On his own.’

‘Oh God,’ Merrily said. ‘They’ve split up, haven’t they?’

‘She told you?’

‘Didn’t need to. I like Eirion a lot – the kind of guy she needs to meet in ten years’ time. At Jane’s age I suppose you need to split up a few times.’

‘He may even be prepared to wait. He…’ Lol breathed out. ‘He also said Jane thinks I’m sleeping with Moira Cairns.’

‘Did he?’

‘The way we musicians do. When we’re not shooting heroin into our arms.’

‘I’ve heard that, too.’

‘About Moira?’

‘And the heroin, but I think that’s exaggerated in your case. Look… we’re OK, aren’t we?’

Lol nodded. He kissed her slowly, both hands in her hair. ‘I hope.’ And then they walked down, towards the not-very-bright lights of the town.

Jane snatched her fleece from the peg and ran out of the front door, catching up with Jenny Box on the edge of the square.

I’m sorry…’

Jenny Box turned. Her scarf fell away. Her red-gold hair shone under one of the fake gaslamps.

‘Mrs Box, I’m really sorry, OK? I should not have said that stuff.’

‘Jane—’

‘It’s not my place to be judgemental. I’m immature for my age and I’m probably becoming right-wing and moralistic and—’

‘Jane,’ Jenny Box said, ‘if you want to continue the conversation, fine.’

‘Do you want to… come back to the vicarage?’

Jenny Box looked around the square. ‘I think I’d rather walk, if you don’t mind. Sitting there facing each other across a table, that can be a little fraught. Besides, there’s less opportunity for me to try and seduce you out here on the street.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Jane said, eyes still full of tears. ‘I don’t know what to believe any more. About anything.’

Merrily took the Walford road out of Ross, turning left when the headlight beams penetrated the tight steel compound that was the base of the first big pylon in the great chain.

‘I’ve never come into the Forest of Dean from this end,’ Huw said. ‘Always come down from Gloucester before.’

‘It’s strange. Like a frontier.’ She drove slowly along the narrow valley road, the full beams occasionally finding one of the pylons gripping the hillside like the skeletons of steel-clawed eagles. ‘The Forest’s a different country. You assume it must have different laws, and you wonder if you might be breaking one of them without knowing it.’

‘You feel insecure?’

‘Bit.’

She’d told him about Lisa Pawson’s unnerving encounter with Roddy Lodge and Lynsey Davies, expecting him to make some reference, as Frannie Bliss might have done, to the couple behaving like Fred and Rose West. But he’d said nothing. She

hadn’t told him about the postscript; she wanted to ask Bliss if they’d been able to ascertain roughly when Lynsey had died.

Merrily said, ‘I’m still not sure what we’re going for… what you’re chasing – peace-of-mind, redemption… or some kind of revenge.’

Huw did his small throaty laugh – a smoker’s laugh, which was odd in somebody who didn’t smoke. He didn’t reply. What a strange, unfocused job this was: no framework for measuring success. Not like Frannie Bliss, walking away with a conviction, a result. Most times, you just came away confused.

The headlights picked up the base of the lone Scots pine at the right turning for Underhowle. There’d be a big sign here next summer, perhaps: The Ariconium Centre.

‘I went over to Much Marcle once,’ Huw said, ‘one fine afternoon – October 1995, some weeks after Julia’s death. I went into the church – a white feeling inside, lots of marble, nothing there. Nothing for me, anyroad. And then I went and sat inside the hollow yew tree, in the churchyard, where I know he must have sat, because everybody has. Happen that were the problem: every bugger had sat there at some time or other. It was all smudged.’

‘You were looking for anything that might be left of West?’ ‘So I got back in the car and I drove up on the Kempley road, to the Fingerpost Field and the Letterbox Field, up near where the bugger lived. Where he buried two bodies – happen more, but two’s all they found. County boundary goes through there, and he knew exactly where it was and he buried ’em both on the Gloucester side because, when it come down to it, he never really liked Much Marcle, on account of everybody knows your business in a village. He liked the anonymity of the city. So he planted ’em on the Gloucester side, so they could look down on Marcle and nobody in Marcle’d ever know.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘I know him,’ Huw said, and under the flat ridge of his voice there was a kind of horror, like the bodies under the floor in Cromwell Street. ‘When the cops took him back to Marcle, he said he could see ghosts in the fields. Said they came to him in his cell: Rena, his first wife and Ann McFall – Anna, he called her. Said he saw their ghosts, but later he took it back, said he’d made that up.’

‘And you,’ Merrily said softly. ‘Did you see any ghosts?’

Huw sniffed. ‘Stood at the top of Fingerpost Field, thought what a lovely place it were, with the view down to Marcle church and across the valley to Ridge Hill. I had a… a rite in me pocket. In a notebook. A procedure… a formal…’

Merrily slowed right down. ‘An exorcism?’

‘Didn’t give it a title.’

‘For Fred West?’

‘Happen.’

‘But you can’t… can you?’ Roddy Lodge’s garage was on the right, across its cindered forecourt. She’d been planning to point it out to Huw, and the message chalked on the door – Put him down a cesspit where he belongs – but this was more important and she drove past. ‘You can’t exorcize Fred West. Because, however much evil there was, you can’t…’

Can’t exorcise a ghost, she was going to say. You could only exorcize a demonic presence. Anything that had once been human – an unquiet spirit – could only be directed back to its maker.

She shut up; it was, after all, Huw who’d taught her this stuff. ‘Sometimes…’ He leaned forward, scrubbing at the condensation on the windscreen. ‘Sometimes I think in the modern Church you can make it up as you go along. What’s this, Merrily? What are all these lights? Who the bloody hell are all these buggers?’

Merrily leaned on the brakes.

But they were already surrounded.

Lol’s pub crawl ended at an inn down by the River Wye, with a beer garden extending to the dark water’s edge. This was where he finally found the girl who had said her name was Cola French.

Down the far end of the bar was a group of people of varying ages but a shared self-conscious and slightly dated eccentricity. There was a woman of late middle age in a purple bolero and black lipstick, a bald guy in an elaborately torn biker jacket and bangles, and a small, round man with a long crimson beard who was doing the talking until Cola French, grinning, poked him in the chest. ‘Jaz, you’re a lying old bastard!’

‘And you are a whore,’ Jaz said mildly, and Cola cracked up laughing.

Then she saw Lol standing near the doorway – Lol, who didn’t drink much, never knew where to put himself and sometimes found the friendly English pub the loneliest place in the world.

‘Hey!’ Cola said. ‘Shit!’

Her hair was a dazzling white tonight with tiny gold stars in it. She wore the same black fleece top she’d had on the other day at the Old Rectory. It was not yet eight p.m. and she seemed to be moderately drunk: Cola French, the writer and occasional bookshop assistant whose TV play would have been perused by the great Dennis Potter himself, if he hadn’t snuffed it.

She unstitched herself from the Bohemian tapestry at the bottom of the bar, weaved right up to Lol and peered into his eyes.

‘This guy who was in, I dunno, some pub, said there was a bloke looking for me. Tell me it was you.’

‘Could’ve been,’ admitted Lol, whose quest had taken him to four other bars in Ross – soft drinks and suspicious looks that said, If you only want a small orange juice and you’re on your own, what are you really doing here, mate?

‘Which is like… serendi— serendipitous,’ Cola said. ‘Because you know what? I… know who you are.’

She prodded Lol once in the chest, making a big gesture of it and then stepping away like she’d identified him from a wanted poster. She bent forward, with a hand on each thigh, and began to sing softly:

And it’s always on the sunny days you feel you can’t go on. On rainy days, it rains on everyone.

And I’m running for the subway and I’m hiding under trees On fine days like these.

‘Hey!’ someone shouted. ‘If it was karaoke night, it’d say so on the bloody door!’

Cola said. ‘I grew up with that song. My older sister had the album. Hazey Jane Two, right?’ She leaned right up to Lol again, shared with him some warm brandy breath. ‘Right?’

‘Who told you?’ He was thrown. This did not happen. Nobody had ever recognized him. It was all too long ago. The bar was suddenly twice as full, and everybody was looking at him, and his body began to quiver with the need to run and keep on running.

‘Ah!’ Cola tapped the side of her nose with a forefinger. She took his arm and turned to the woman in the purple bolero. ‘Deirdre, if I do not shag this guy tonight, then all life is meaningless, right?’

It all happened so quickly, like a night raid, the first banner screaming WE DON’T WANT HIM!, then someone spotting the dog collar on Huw, a whoop going up, a dozen lamp beams clashing in the air like random fireworks.

And then figures were running at the car, some with placards brandished like shields, others pointing the poles outwards like battle stakes – Merrily hitting the brakes when the windscreen was filled with a white board demanding KEEP SATAN OUT! – and faces bloated with self-righteousness.

She looked around vainly for anyone she might recognize, couldn’t spot a Sam Hall or a Fergus Young or a Piers Connor- Crewe or even the fat man from the newsagent’s who didn’t want his adopted village connected with a sicko.

BURN HIM! appeared in Huw’s side window, and there was the blast of a hunting horn, sinister in the night, a baying for blood. If it hadn’t been for the TV crew she’d have locked all the doors. She certainly wouldn’t have wound down her window except for the young woman in the red jacket, with the furry-covered boom mike.

‘Amanda Patel, BBC Midlands Today. Is it Mrs Watkins? Could we have a word?’

The light on top of the camera was full in Merrily’s eyes. She was on her own; Huw had slipped out of the car without a word and moved away. Huw who had never been known to give an interview, not even to the Church Times.

‘Could you give me a minute to find out what’s happening?’ She’d managed to drive as far as the community centre before the crush of bodies had forced her to stop. There must be a couple of hundred people here: men, women, kids.

‘OK, look,’ Amanda Patel said, ‘we’ll come back to you in about five. If you want to listen to what some of these people have to say and then respond to it, is that OK? It’ll be for the half-ten bulletin, and breakfast.’

Merrily nodded. No dog collar, frayed old duffel coat. She didn’t want to do an interview at all, and the Bishop wouldn’t be happy, but it would look worse if she backed out and all they had was pictures of the Volvo surrounded, and her and Huw blinking in the lights, bemused, ineffectual clergy.

The camera light swept from her face to illuminate a placard opposite.

Roddy’s body – OUT!

Amanda Patel was setting up a tall, rangy-looking guy in a fur-trimmed leather jacket. ‘OK, Nick, if you just stand… yeah, that’s fine. OK, George? Right.’ A giggle, then into TV-tone. ‘Nick Longton, you’re the councillor for this area, why are you backing this protest?’

‘Well, let me say first of all that I’m very proud to represent this village on the Herefordshire Council – an example of the wonders that can be achieved when we all work together, the people and the local authority…’

Merrily recalled Fergus Young this morning saying that five years ago the council had been ready to shut down the school.

‘… And I don’t want to see this place becoming notable for the wrong reasons.’ Nick Longton’s accent was not local. ‘I also have enormous sympathy for the relatives of people already buried in the churchyard who don’t want to have to walk past the grave of a serial murderer.’

‘But surely,’ Amanda Patel said, over muted applause, ‘Roddy Lodge, in the eyes of the law, is an innocent man because, however damning things may seem—’

‘Amanda, we know he killed one woman, and dozens of the people here tonight heard him confess to killing at least two more. It may be weeks, months, even years before more bodies are found, and this is going to hang over everyone – particularly the family of Melanie Pullman, whom Lodge named as one of his victims – and it would be disgraceful if they had to keep walking past his name on a gravestone, with some pious Rest in Peace carving on it. What kind of peace will his victims be resting in?’

‘But he’s a local man. Isn’t his family entitled to have him buried here?’

‘In my view and the views of my constituents, a murderer forfeits that kind of right,’ Nick said. ‘We don’t want that man’s body here.’

Amanda Patel nodded, and the camera light went out. Merrily was thinking how pompous councillors had become, talking of their ‘constituents’, having their own ‘cabinet’. She felt annoyed. Stared at the flickering faces, saw duplicity, hypocrisy… and the funfair factor. How many of these so-called protesters were really angry or distressed at the thought of having a murderer in the churchyard? How many of them wouldn’t be secretly thrilled by the vicarious notoriety?

Merrily saw Huw beckoning to her from the village hall entrance, turned to him and spread her hands, helpless. And then the light was back on her, and up came the boom mike in its fluffy wind-muff, like an inquisitive woolly puppet, deceptively friendly.

‘Merrily Watkins,’ Amanda Patel said, ‘you’re the priest sent in by the Church to conduct the funeral service for Roddy Lodge, after the local minister refused. Do you feel entirely happy about what you’re doing?’

‘Nobody could really feel happy in this situation, but everyone, in my view, is entitled to a Christian burial. I feel deeply sorry for people whose missing relatives were named by Mr Lodge, but even if he’s guilty – which, as you said earlier, he is not, in the eyes of the law – he should be properly laid to rest.’

‘Don’t you think it would be better if he was simply cremated?’

‘That’s not a decision for me.’

‘It’s no secret, Mrs Watkins, that you’re also the Diocesan Deliverance Consultant – the Hereford exorcist. Roddy Lodge referred to himself as Satan. Does that have any bearing on why you were selected for this job?’

‘Erm…’ Well, BBC News didn’t believe in the supernatural, and certainly not in connection with a hard news story. ‘No,’ Merrily said. ‘None at all.’

Amanda Patel nodded. ‘Mrs Watkins, these residents – now supported, as you can see, by dozens of people from surrounding villages – say they’re going to keep up a permanent watch, and any hearse attempting to bring Roddy Lodge’s body into Underhowle will be stopped. Even the regular gravedigger’s saying he’ll be refusing to dig a grave for Lodge. How do you feel about that?’

Merrily said, ‘I think you’ll find that any interference with the free flow of traffic is probably a matter for the police, not for me. However, grave-digging is a matter for the Church, and I’m sure something will be sorted out.’

‘So you’re saying you’re prepared to go ahead with this funeral no matter what happens.’

‘Like if somebody puts a bomb under the church?’

Amanda Patel smiled in resignation and signalled to the cameraman to stop recording. The light went out. ‘Cheers,’ Amanda said.

People had started chattering again. She heard a woman say, ‘Of course, half of them are lesbians…’ as some of the protesters set up a chant: ‘Roddy’s body OUT, Roddy’s body OUT ’.

It was unlikely, especially with the TV here, that this demo was spontaneous. But who would have planned it? Perhaps the media-wise Development Committee. Merrily stood in the lane, feeling furious. A bit player in a fantasy – several fantasies colliding like the torch beams, like short-lived fireworks, brief explosions in the common-sense night.

‘Merrily…’ A hand under her elbow.

She turned. Huw was standing under one of the globular lamps outside the village hall.

‘Let’s get out of here, Huw.’

‘Merrily,’ Huw said. ‘This is…’

There was a woman with him: flaking waxed jacket, penetrating brown eyes in a faintly familiar, wind-tanned face.

Huw said, ‘Ingrid’s going to show us the new tourist centre.’

‘Huw, I just—’

‘The Baptist chapel? You remember Jerome telling us about the Baptist chapel? A place of considerable historic significance. Well worth a visit. Besides…’ Huw nodded at an elderly woman in a long purple mac advancing from the crowd. ‘You might not want to hang around here.’

‘You!’ The elderly woman pointed at Merrily. ‘I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: you’re the beginning of the end, you are, women priests! Only a woman so-called priest would bury the damned!’

‘Don’t get involved, lass,’ Huw murmured.

Amidst the half-manufactured excitement, the chants of Roddy’s body OUT, there was an eye-of-the-storm stillness around him, conveying an awareness of being exactly where he needed to be.

39 Good at Men

‘I’M WRITING A new play,’ Cola French said from the bed, ‘about a woman I’d be, you know, really scared of being. You know what I mean? A woman whose appetites are so… extreme that… wow, it’s apocalyptic. See, we think of these larger-than- life people as being like, you know, big movie stars and rock idols. But that’s so totally wrong. In reality those guys are all dead lazy and boring and too vain to realize it.’

She didn’t seem very drunk any more, now she was back home in this well-organized bedsit, with a computer and printer and bookshelves with so many books that they were stacked horizontally, and a view over a car park to the tall steeple of St Mary’s.

‘I don’t include you among the boring rock stars, of course,’ she told Lol. ‘You are very interesting. You’re among the exalted ranks of the Disappeared – kind of Syd Barrett.’ She raised herself, propped her head up with an elbow. ‘He’s actually older than my dad, the great Syd Barrett. You can’t be anywhere near that old. I’m like… amazed how young you look. I’m even more amazed that you were wandering the streets, the night before your big comeback gig – looking for me.’

‘Gig?’ Lol said.

‘Aw, come on! I’ve known about that gig for days. It’s even on the Net.’

‘It can’t be.’

‘Lol… Lol… honey… you’ve got a serious cult-base out there, you know that? God, look at your face! You didn’t know, didn’t did you?’ Cola scrambled up and sat on the side of the bed. ‘The copper it was, told me who you were. Mumford, who came back to see Piers. So… OK, there’s this Website, right? Devoted to the Dead and the Disappeared – Morrison, Barrett, Drake, Edwards, et cetera – and you, as it happens. And so I e-mailed them. I said, I have just seen the real Lol Robinson and he was working for this little guy who installs septic tanks. And some dickbrain e-mails back and says, You’re talking crap because Lol Robinson’s on at the Courtyard, Hereford, on Wednesday night as support to Moira Cairns, so there! You can’t win. I can’t, anyway. Even bloody Dennis Potter dies on me.’

‘This woman’s Lynsey Davies, isn’t it?’ Lol said.

‘Huh?’

‘The woman with extreme appetites. The woman you’d be scared of being.’

‘Hmm.’ Cola’s eyes narrowed. ‘What makes you say that?’

Lol shrugged. He was sitting on a plastic pouffe at the foot of the bed, his back to a chest of drawers supporting a lamp made out of an ouzo bottle. The lamp had a red bulb and made the room look like an intelligent brothel.

‘The point I was trying to make,’ Cola said, ‘is that it usually isn’t the famous people who become the most extreme members of the human race, it’s the people with something to rise above. That’s what the play’s about. This woman who comes out of a council estate in the Forest, does surprisingly well at school even though she don’t give a toss, then drops out of college and goes on the game. Just because she’s bored. Does the booze and the drugs and then goes on the game, at the age of about seventeen or eighteen.’

‘In Ross?’

Cola exploded with laughter. ‘Ross? And make actual money at it? Listen, I know some of these women – they’re lucky if they can turn over a hundred a night in Hereford. Hey…’ She blinked. ‘You didn’t go with Lynsey ever, did you, at some time?’

Lol shook his head.

‘That’s not supposed to be insulting, by the way,’ Cola said, ‘because that woman could pull, you know? Where’d I put my cigs?’

Lol spotted them on the computer table with a book of matches. He went over and collected them for her.

‘Ta,’ Cola said. ‘Well, that’s something.’

‘A lot of people around here went with her?’

‘That a serious question?’

Lol recalled her saying, when they were digging up Piers Connor-Crewe’s Efflapure, Let’s be honest, she was good at men. He went back to sit on the plastic pouffe. ‘It’s just I remember you saying, when we were at the Rectory, that Lynsey Davies had this fierce determination to grab everything from life.’

‘Did I?’

‘I’m kind of a writer too, Cola. Despite “Sunny Days”. I remember these lines.’

Cola grinned and yawned and stretched. ‘Yeah, all right, the play’s about her. She’s the protagonist. Lynsey. She wanted to grab things from life that maybe you aren’t supposed to, and she scares the shit out of me, still. But you got to write about what scares you, otherwise it’s all meaningless, right?’

‘Why does she scare you still?’ Lol asked.

‘Do I have to? Couldn’t we just have sex?’

‘Please don’t give me a hard time,’ Lol said. ‘I have a feeling this is somehow very important.’

She lit up. ‘Why?’

‘Because of the reason I can’t have sex with you.’

‘A woman, right?’ Rueful smile through the smoke. ‘What else? Well, I’m glad for you. I read the stuff on the Website and I’m glad for you, OK?’ Cola rolled off the bed, leaned across him to the chest of drawers, brought out a wine case from behind the ouzo lamp. ‘But this is gonna fuck up your night’s sleep even more, sunshine, believe me.’

It had the feel, Merrily thought, of some desperate ballroom in the Depression, where, although it was semi-derelict, people still came to dance against the darkness.

How old?’ Huw asked.

‘About 1740, originally, but it was completely refurbished early last century, which, I expect, is why it avoided being listed.’ Ingrid Sollars offered a smile to Huw; it was thin but it was a smile. In the twenty minutes or so while Merrily had been with the TV people, he appeared to have sought out and charmed the formidable Sollars, so spiky and unhelpful to Frannie Bliss.

‘So 1740, that’d be… what?’ Huw said. ‘A century or so after they broke away from the C of E?’

‘They were a new and radical movement in those days, Mr Owen, and this was one of the earliest chapels. Nearly as old as the one at Ryeford, down the valley. I expect you’re surrounded by the things in your part of Wales.’

‘Not like this,’ Huw said.

It was big. Bigger than most village churches in this area. Coming in through the door – Victorian Gothic, like the school, so not the original one – there had been that numinous vacuum waft you always got when a small door opened into a disused auditorium. And then what Merrily always thought of as the slightly soured stench of spent spirituality.

Ingrid Sollars said, ‘Since it was abandoned as a place of worship in the 1970s, it’s seen service as a warehouse, a kind of sports hall and finally a water-bottling plant – another local enterprise that bit the dust.’

Huw said, ‘Water from… ?’

‘There’s a spring virtually underneath.’

‘Is there?’

‘Not a terribly reliable one, unfortunately.’ Mrs Sollars’s weathered face seemed more open than Merrily remembered; her dusty bun of hair less tight. ‘No one was surprised when the business failed, because things generally did, you see. That’s the story of Underhowle – a short wave of industry, then a long, slow, bloodless decline. We are – we were – hoping for a stronger foundation this time. Industry supported by education.’

‘So you’re the historian here, Ingrid,’ Huw said. ‘The curator.’ ‘I ran a small tourist initiative here years ago, when my husband was alive, had a few hundred leaflets printed. We had trekking ponies at the riding school then, making us probably the only tourist enterprise in the village. They… Well, I suppose the committee keep me on in recognition of that pioneering initiative – and as the token local.’

‘And how do you feel about them turning this place into a museum?’

‘I’m in charge of the project,’ she said, as though this effectively prevented her from commenting. ‘I’m the keyholder.’

‘So?’

She didn’t blink. ‘And I suppose I must be unhappy about it, in some way, or I wouldn’t have let you in.’

Merrily took a proper look around. The chapel walls had been replastered, and an old gallery was being rebuilt, presumably for museum exhibits. But the altar was long gone, and the pulpit, of course. There were large areas of shadow, resistant to the naked bulbs hanging from the ceiling on frayed black flex. The bulbs, twelve of them, were probably high-wattage, but you could see all their filaments inside the straining veins of light.

‘Unhappy?’ Huw prompted.

Mrs Sollars didn’t expand, clearly wasn’t going to without some more effort on their part. It would be a matter of asking the right questions.

‘The Lodge family worshipped here,’ Merrily said. ‘And I think it was once actually owned by Roddy Lodge?’

‘Both the chapel and the garage were owned by the bottling company, and the whole lot was sold off when they went bankrupt. At the time, as I recall, Roddy Lodge had his bequest, which I believe was quite substantial – his father had sold the land on which the council estate was built – and he bought it for a silly price and then sold this building to the Underhowle Development Fund last year.’

‘Not short of money, are they?’ Merrily said.

‘They’re clever at attracting grants. And Christopher Cody puts funding into it as some sort of tax hedge. The Fund is administered by his solicitor, Ryan Nye.’

‘Who was also Roddy’s lawyer.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ Ingrid Sollars said, ‘but this is a small world. The same fingers in many pies.’ She paused. ‘As you’ll have gathered, I’m rather proprietorial about this village. My father was the last… squire – I guess you’d call it that – and he lost most of his money through unwise investment, and my family moved away. I was the only one who chose to stay. Found it hard to separate from my roots, you might say.’

Ingrid Sollars was very slim, and Merrily thought of a small, tough thorn tree on a hillside, bending with the wind.

‘My ambition was to see some stability here in my lifetime,’ Ingrid said. ‘I thought, perhaps foolishly, that this might at last be in sight, but it seems it only takes one disaster…’

Merrily said tentatively, ‘This protest…’

‘Crass. Stupid. The whole thing’s entirely out of hand and likely to draw even more unwelcome attention to something that should have been allowed to die quietly. But we live in times of gracelessness and excess.’

There was silence, echoes absorbed by the dust sheets on the flagstoned floor and others draped from the gallery like the frayed and mournful curtains in a dying theatre.

‘I suppose Jerome phoned you,’ Huw said. ‘Told you we’d been to see him.’

‘Mr Banks said that you were attached to what he called, rather disparagingly, the Spook Squad and that he’d informed you about reports of an atmosphere here.’

‘That his word or yours?’

Ingrid Sollars hesitated. ‘Mine.’

Atmosphere, Merrily thought. Yes. And it was very cold. Her body acknowledged it; she shivered inside the duffel coat.

Huw didn’t seem aware of the atmosphere. He was walking around slowly, looking down, shards of old plaster cracking under his shoes. ‘So this is where some of the Roman stuff was discovered.’

‘Notably a statuette of what we think is Diana,’ Ingrid Sollars said. ‘It was found by Piers Connor-Crewe about a year ago. And some pottery. And the usual coins.’

‘More here than other places?’

‘That’s what Connor-Crewe always says. Not that he’s as much of an expert as he likes to think. But bookshop owners are often like that, don’t you find?’

Merrily said to Huw, ‘You’re thinking this was possibly the site of a Roman temple, aren’t you? Because of the spring.’

‘Aye. If not also pre-Roman.’

‘That’s also what Connor-Crewe thinks. I suspect he’d quite like to knock this building down just to find out for sure.’

‘It makes a certain sense, Ingrid.’ Huw said. ‘Folks think churches were no longer being built on ancient sacred sites after medieval times. All the mystics and the visionaries involved in Nonconformism tend to get overlooked, because of the puritan element.’

Merrily shivered again. She didn’t like this place with its hanging shadows and straining bulbs.

Huw turned to Ingrid. ‘Was it you who went to Banks originally?’

‘Could hardly go over his head. I attend his services.’

‘And he said what?’

‘Suggested it might be better if I consulted a Baptist minister, in Ross.’

‘Nice get-out. But you wouldn’t do that, would you?’

‘I was hardly going to bring in an outsider.’

‘When was this, lass?’

‘Five months ago, something like that. When the conversion work started for the museum. When the first grant came through. When the builders started asking me if it was haunted.’

‘Because?’

‘Footsteps when there was nobody there. Laughter – sniggers, they said. And items disappearing – tools. Although the doors were locked each night and there were no signs of breaking and entering.’

And you said?’

‘I said, quite truthfully, that I had no knowledge of the former Baptist chapel being haunted. And then there was the accident.’

‘Ah.’

‘One of the builders was working near the ceiling – up there, I think, in that top corner, knocking away damp plaster – when he claimed the hammer was snatched out of his hand. He was so shocked that he reeled away, dislodging his own ladder and falling to the ground. Broke a hip.’

Huw looked up. ‘Bloody lucky it weren’t his neck.’

‘After the first phase,’ Mrs Sollars said, ‘the firm told us they couldn’t fit Phase Two into their schedules for at least a year. In other words, they were pulling out.’

Merrily asked her, ‘What did the Development Committee have to say about that?’

‘Not the kind of publicity we need. Get another firm.’

‘Think back,’ Huw said. ‘It was converted into a bottling plant – when?’

‘Oh, quite recently. It didn’t take long for businesses to crash in Underhowle. Early nineties?’

‘Any trouble then?’

‘If there was, I didn’t hear about it.’

Merrily said, ‘The power lines go right over here, don’t they? Did they follow the same route then?’

‘I don’t think anything’s changed,’ Mrs Sollars said. ‘But I get all that from Sam.’

‘Good old Mr Hall,’ Huw said, and she glanced at him sharply.

‘I don’t have to share his obsession, Mr Owen, but I respect his right to have one.’

‘I see.’ Huw smiled. ‘So you’ve got new builders in now.’

‘Starting on Phase Two in a couple of weeks.’

‘You felt anything in here yourself?’

‘I don’t come in alone unless I really have to.’

‘And if you do…’

‘There’s an atmosphere, I’ll go that far. You have a feeling of… being observed.’

‘In what way?’

She didn’t look at him directly. ‘Sam says that’s a symptom of electrical hypersensitivity, but I certainly haven’t exhibited any of the others. I live, like him, on the hill, well away from the power lines.’

‘So what do you think it is, lass?’

‘I don’t know. But it’s not a good thing.’

‘Would you like us to say some prayers?’

‘Whatever you think might help.’

Huw said, ‘But there’s summat else, isn’t there, Ingrid?’

The wine case was sealed along the top with brown parcel tape. Cola set it down on the hessian rug by the computer table under the window, slipped a fingernail under the tape and slit it open.

‘I want free tickets for your gig for this.’

‘They’ll be on the door,’ Lol said. If he didn’t make it, at least she’d enjoy Moira.

‘Nah, I didn’t mean that,’ Cola said. ‘I don’t want anything.’

‘They’ll still be on the door.’

They knelt together on the rug. Cola lifted the box’s cardboard flaps. ‘So you were actually there when Roddy went to the angels. I wasn’t. I waste all that time watching you not finding a body under Piers’s tank and then I miss the big one. Some writer. OK, here they are.’ She took out some books, trying to hide the first one, but he saw it. It was a children’s Bible with Noah’s Ark on the front.

‘Scary,’ Lol said.

‘That’s mine. I’m embarrassed.’ She held the children’s Bible to her chest.

The second book was a thick black paperback, but its spine was white with fishbone creases: Aleister Crowley’s Magick. Then a hardback: The Secret Rituals of the OTO, by Karl Wurtz. Cola let this one fall open to show Lol some scribblings, in black biro, in the margins. There were two more books on Kundalini serpent power and sex magic. ‘You know about this stuff?’

‘A little.’ Lol noticed that since she’d opened the box, all the bounce had gone from her voice, like a rubber ball rolling away.

‘Sex magic – you use the build-up to an orgasm to channel and focus energy for a particular purpose and then… boom. I mean, I’ve only been a little way along that road, but it is scary. You just have to look at some of the people who went in for it. Aleister Crowley? I mean that guy was a total shit, he was a professional shit. But she’s like – this is Lynsey – “Oh Crowley, he was a pioneer, he knew about real freedom, he didn’t give a fart for anybody. ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.’ Brilliant!” She actually wrote it out – Do what thou wilt, et cetera – in big Gothic letters, had it as a kind of frieze over her bed.’

‘The OTO was the magical society founded on all that – is that right?’

‘Ordo Templi Orientis, something like that. Yeah, still going, I think. Lynsey studied everything she could find, and she got quite a few people into it.’

‘Not the OTO?’

‘Nah, she wasn’t in anything. But she was into everything, if you see what I mean. Into pushing out boundaries – sexual boundaries. Overcoming your inhibitions and breaking through to, like, real enlightenment. Overcoming pain, humiliation and… well, revulsion sometimes.’ She paused, looking at him almost shyly. ‘Coprophagia – you know what that is?’

‘It’s, er, an old album by The Who, isn’t it?’

Cola grinned.

‘Not really, was she?’ Lol said.

‘Don’t ask.’ She gathered the books into a pile. ‘See, I was always having to keep stuff like this for her since the day she had a row with this guy Paul, who she was living with, and he burned some of her books. She said she didn’t mind when they had fights – I mean actual fights, black-eye, split-up stuff – but she drew the line at him messing with her stuff. She had two kids, I think it was, with Paul. Big guy, Jamaican, smoked dope on an industrial scale. If you’d told me Paul had done for her, in a barney, I wouldn’t’ve been that surprised. His ma has the kids now, which is just as well.’

‘If she was still with this Paul,’ Lol said, ‘where did Roddy Lodge come in?’

‘The word “with” is relative.’ Cola dipped back into the wine case and brought out a cardboard folder. ‘I feel better for this, really. I still had this stuff when she died, and I thought, do I take it to the cops or what? But I couldn’t think how it was gonna help anybody and… you know…’

‘You had this idea for a play.’

‘See… you understand. Another creative person. I still haven’t decided whether to do Lynsey herself – kind of documentary – or have a character based on her. You’d have to tone it down, either way. People wouldn’t believe the – you know – the appetite.’

‘You said, good at men…’

‘You ever seen her? Look…’ She opened the folder and slid out a photograph but kept most of it covered up so that Lol could just see the top half of a woman with frizzy black hair and deep-set eyes. ‘I’m not a man, but I could feel it sometimes, you know?’

‘How well did you know her?’

‘From the pubs. And of course from the shop. From Piers.’

‘Piers was…?’

‘Oh yeah! Payment for books was how it started. Piers likes to interface with his customers, says a bookseller should be like a good doctor or a herbalist – give you advice, supply you with what you need to cure your… mineral deficiencies.’ Cola tried half-heartedly to wink and her eyebrow ring dipped. ‘It’s a bigger shop than it looks. Some punters get to go up into the attic or down into the basement, if you see what I mean.’

‘Sorry, I’m naive,’ Lol said. ‘You mean for books or…’

‘Yeah, books. Books, too. Mainly books. Heavy books, heavier than this stuff. The other activities, it’s The Old Rectory mostly.’ He also does’ – Lol tapped the books – ‘this stuff?’

‘Sex magic? Mostly he just does sex, but he’s up for most things. Nice enough guy, in a lot of ways, Piers. Easy-going, and he doesn’t ask for too much in some departments, if you want the truth. You could actually feel sorry for him with Lynsey, ’cause Lynsey asked for a lot. And didn’t always ask. You know?’

Lol said, ‘You have mixed feelings about having these books around, don’t you?’

‘Aw, I just… you know, I didn’t like to think where they’d been, and when we knew she’d died I packed them up. I mean there’s a lot of stuff in there, a lot of notes she made. I like to think I’ll get round to unscrambling it all one day. But not yet. It’s too soon. And…’ She put down the children’s Bible. ‘This was… I just felt I wanted something like a barrier, you know? It was all I could get in a hurry. Bought it from the second-hand stall on Ross market. Religion and innocence. Put it on the top and sealed the box.’

‘Let’s put them away,’ Lol said.

‘I was gonna show you this.’ Cola held up the photo again, uncovering all of it this time. ‘See, Lynsey used to talk about this a lot. There was a time in her life when she said she was like on this big high the whole time, had the most fun you could ever have, the most freedom. She’d’ve been about seventeen.’

In the colour photo, Lynsey Davies was sitting on the grass beside a van. There was a man sitting next to her. Lynsey wore jeans. The jeans were partly unzipped. The man had a hand inside the jeans, the zip around his wrist. The man was quite a bit older than Lynsey. He had curly hair and a yellowy butcher’s boy grin for the camera. A ‘look what I’ve got’ grin.

‘Oh my God,’ Lol said.

Cola said, ‘You don’t want to stay the night, do you?’ and her voice was quite small now. ‘No. You’ve got a girlfriend. I’m sorry.’

‘I’m sorry, too.’

‘You actually don’t know the half of it,’ Cola said. ‘Do you want to know the rest?’

‘I know someone who might.’

‘Yeah,’ Cola said and thought for a while. She looked, momentarily, very young and uncertain. ‘Perhaps this is best.’ She handed him another book, a white one without a dustjacket. ‘You better take this. I mean take it away. I’ve read it. Some of it. I don’t want to read it again.’

It was a fat, page-a-day diary. On the front, was inscribed in black, by hand: The Magickal Diary of Lynsey D

‘It doesn’t follow the dates or anything; she just wrote in it when she had something to say. I never gave it you, if anybody asks. I don’t think I want it back.’ She packed up the box and put the children’s Bible on top before closing the flaps. She looked up at him. ‘Your girlfriend – she’s a priest, isn’t she?’

Lol nodded.

‘Mumford told me,’ Cola said. ‘The copper.’

‘That’s why you got these out, isn’t it?’ Lol said.

Cola nodded. ‘Tell you what, why don’t you take the lot? She’ll know what do with them.’ She tried for a wry smile, which soon faded. ‘I’ll hang on to the kids’ Bible.’

40 Big Shoes

THE AIR IN Ledwardine was damp and chilly, and Jane told Jenny Box that she felt old, felt like she’d been alive for ever and knew everything the world had to tell her, and it all came to nothing. All you needed to know was that everybody had a banal personal agenda and, after a short-lived glow, everything faded into grey disillusion and the realization that anybody – anybody – given the circumstances, would shaft you, to attain something really trivial. And, as there was no God to intervene on behalf of justice and balance, you just went through life trying to avoid getting shafted. And that was it – you went through life. That was it. Nothing. Nothing but going through life.

As soon as it was out, gasped into the misty village night, Jane couldn’t believe she’d said it. Especially to Jenny Box, this superficial, pseudo-spiritual business person, this daytime-TV phoney. She felt like one of the stupid punters on Jerry Springer or Livetime, coughing up great gouts of angst like phlegm for people to say, Oh how disgusting, thank God I’m not like that.

But Jenny Box didn’t react as expected. Didn’t say this was a stupid attitude for someone so young, at the dawn of everything, on the threshold of the great adventure, and all that crap.

‘It can be a bad time,’ Jenny said. ‘When I was your age, most of the time I was in a state of confusion and terror. I’d shut myself in my room – whichever anonymous room it happened to be – and I’d shiver and cry and take pills sometimes. And then, at some strategic point, a kind man would come along and he’d go, “There, there, I’ll look after you, you’re with me now, and everything’s going to be all right”.’

‘This was when you were modelling?’ They were standing just under the fat oak pillars of the market hall, which inhabited the cobbles like some giant, fossilized crustacean.

‘I left home after an unhappy experience with the priest, Father Colm. I told your mother it was a friend of mine he’d had his auld hands all over, but I don’t suppose she was fooled.’

‘Oh.’ Mum hadn’t mentioned this.

‘The awesome injustice of it was that, although they never talked about it and they still don’t, my family and the whole damn community held me responsible for the downfall of a Good Man.’

That figured, thinking back to what Eirion had gleaned from the Net: Jenny Driscoll brought up in a rigid, rural Catholic community, and then ‘escaping’ into the heartless, soulless media world of a foreign country. Looked like a girl who bruised easily.

Jenny said, ‘Modelling. Yes, you can model for passing fashions or you can model for old, old perversions. Oh, I was a model, all right. I was styled for abuse.’

Jane looked at the pale face under the white scarf, lustred by the haloes of the fake gaslamps. Romantic in a besmirched way.

‘Some women are, you know – quite literally. This was the heartless eighties, and I became the image that fuelled the fantasies of thousands of men of a certain sort. A woman with the frailty of a child doll. Turn her upside down and listen to her cry – mama, mama – and then make it better. And they do make it better for a while. But when you stop crying, it isn’t long before they start to miss it, and they have to make you cry again and again. And they don’t realize the crying mechanism’s all worn out, and that’s how the doll gets broken. Does this shock you at all, Jane?’

‘Well, I…’

‘Ah, but you’re a modern girl. You’ve heard it all before.’

‘Maybe I just haven’t thought about it,’ Jane admitted. ‘Not really. Like, you’re bombarded from all sides with statistics and reports and people opening their hearts, and there’s just so much of it that it all becomes a mush. You don’t really hear it any more.’

‘No. Well, the thing I’m trying to explain – the time’s come when I have to explain it – is how I came to… fancy your mother. I didn’t think I’d be explaining it to you, but no matter, you’re the one that’s here.’

‘Oh,’ Jane said, with a tightening of the gut.

They walked through the deserted night-time village, through the centuries from cobbles to tarmac, down Church Street where Lucy Devenish, the folklorist, had lived in a black and white cottage and inspired Jane in all kinds of ways before dying. And then down towards the modern bungalow where Gomer Parry lived, alone now since Minnie had died, alone at work without Nev and without even Gwynneth and Muriel, the diggers.

Ledwardine itself remained unhurt by any of it, an organism, as Mum liked to call it, with the joins between the ancient and the new glossed over in black and white paint, and the warm lamps in the windows melting their bits of night. In many ways, it was the ultimate place to live. A nest.

But that wasn’t why Jenny Box had come. That was, like she’d told Mum, because of the angel. And also, it seemed, exactly as Gareth Box had said, because of the angel that was Mum. And yet it all sounded different, as Jenny Box talked about men and women and the Church.

‘… All the men who directed the religions of the world, waged the holy wars – leaving the women at home because the women weren’t strong enough to fight or strident enough to preach. Well, thank God for that, because during the time they were left behind, with only the small, domestic things to exercise their minds, women were learning to look inwards. To journey inside themselves and reach the ocean of the spirit.’

Jane struggled with this. It wasn’t feminism as she knew it.

‘We find the strength inside ourselves,’ Jenny said, ‘and that’s the only true strength. All the rest is violence.’

She’d fled the Church because it had been dominated, for her, by male violence, and she’d taken refuge in the New Age – all those hazy places Jane had been – because it was all basically Goddess-dominated. And that was how Vestalia had come about.

‘We mind the hearth, is what we do, the altar of the home. It’s men, you see, who despoiled the old, simple churches, so you have areas like the Bull Chapel in the parish church here, with the tombs of brutal men and their effigies reflecting material wealth and power. I’d surely take a jackhammer to that auld divil now and throw the pieces in the river.’

‘Yes,’ said Jane, who’d often felt the same about the sandstone effigy in the Bull Chapel, with its eyes fully open and its arrogant little smile.

But, while bemoaning the way it had been dragged into the male world of warfare and brutality, Jenny had come to miss the Church, the weight of it, the tradition, the sometimes pure beauty of it. And then something happened to beckon her back.

‘One day, I was in North Wales, alone. I’d had… well, call it nervous exhaustion, and I’d been lent a cottage, to disappear there for a while. And this day I’d walked for hours on my own, trying to cool my head, and it started raining, and I came upon this wee church, not far from the sea, and it was open, and so I went in to shelter. ’Twas very plain – no stained glass, no statues, no tombs, no carvings. The simplicity, that was a big statement in itself, a huge statement. And for me it was as if I was coming home again, you know? I was enfolded by it. I think your mother would understand.’

‘She’s been there. Well, not there, but like… somewhere similar.’

Yeah, a similar church, on a similarly desperate day, bringing away with her what she’d talked of as the vision of blue and gold, the lamplit path – less a calling than a beckoning whisper at a time of personal crisis, and the one aspect of Mum’s religion that Jane had always understood.

But had Mum told Jenny Box about the experience? And had Jenny Box now absorbed it into her own mythology? Uncertainty seized Jane again. Was she being used in some way? She glanced at Mrs Box, walking with her head down, hands in the pockets of her brown, rain-bubbled Barbour, talking about why, when she came back, it was not to the Church of Rome but to the Anglican Church that she’d been taught, as a child, to despise.

‘You see, the strange thing was, the day I went into that little Celtic church – though I didn’t know this until afterwards – that was the very day the Synod, or whoever it was, voted to permit the ordination of women. So here was I, feeling the call back to Christianity… and here was God meeting me halfway.’

Jane stopped in the street. ‘You mean you joined the Anglican Church because it had accepted women as priests?’

Jenny smiled at last. ‘And wasn’t that the most significant development since Christ himself was on earth?’

There was a stage, Jenny Box told Jane, when she’d even wondered about becoming a nun, but didn’t think she could handle the discipline. And no, she didn’t really see herself becoming a priest. Too much of a private person. But when her marriage went the way of all her other relationships – she didn’t elaborate, perhaps she didn’t need to – and she was looking for a permanent bolt-hole, it was natural to seek out somewhere with a woman priest who looked like staying.

The questions started hammering inside Jane. ‘No, listen,’ Jenny Box snapped, ‘I know it sounds like I was stalking her, but it isn’t like that. I needed to know this was the right place. The right home. The right hearth.’

‘What are you saying?’ A car came around the corner from Old Barn Lane, sending up spray from the gutter, and some of hit Jane in the face like spit. ‘What did you do?’

‘I just did my research, was all. If we’re taking on a new manager for one of the shops, I like to know where they’re coming from, whether they fit in with the ideology of the business.’

‘You had her checked out?’

‘There’s… an agency we use in London.’

‘Like…’ Jane wiped her face with the sleeve of her fleece. ‘You don’t mean a private investigator?’

‘Obviously, the agency we use doesn’t work out here, but they subcontracted it to a local man. Don’t look at me like that, Jane; I needed a priest, I’ve always needed a priest, someone who could guide me on my journey into the great ocean of the spirit. Maybe join me there. Don’t look at me like that! It’s not sexual and I’m not mad, all right?’

Jane felt suddenly light-headed. ‘Not sexual?’

‘Holy God, girl!’ Jenny Box flinched, and her features appeared suddenly blurred and oblique, as though she’d been struck. ‘Does everything have to be sexual? I’m on the run from all that. My husband is greedy, violent… and worse.’

‘Gareth?’

‘Yes, the charming Gareth, who likes young girls, gets off on the vulnerable, who only married me because when I was thirty- five there was still something about me that looked eighteen, but let’s not go into that. Oh, he has a very considerable charm, does Gareth, and a wonderfully plausible manner, and it worked on me for a long time – I’m not easy for the charm, but he was good at it, and I thought he wasn’t like the others, but… You see, it took God to show me what I was doing – letting them bully me, Jane. Hadn’t I always been attracting the kind of men who loved to bully women? And me turning it to my advantage, I thought – figuring I could get my own way in the end by letting them dominate me. Which is all fine and well until the day you say no, just the once, and then it starts to get ugly. Christ, does it get ugly. So if you ask me what I wanted from your mother… I wanted a friend, was all, a friend to go with me on the spiritual journey.’

it

Oh God. Jane looked away, across the street.

‘And the things Humphries found out, the private eye… all he told me, Jane, were good things – how she helped sort out that trouble in the village over the play, the things she’d done as an exorcist… I’d never even heard of a woman exorcist before, a woman appointed to deal with the Devil himself – well, this was stepping into the big shoes. And how she stopped this charismatic priest who was abusing women. And then helping the mentally ill guy – that kind of thing.’

Jane looked up. ‘Mentally ill guy?’

‘Robinson?’

‘Oh. Right.’

‘And when I saw her, what kind of a person she was – so unassuming – I knew she was someone I wanted to help. I swear to God it’s no more complex than that. So whatever Gareth told you…’

And Jenny began talking of this recent discord over the business, Vestalia, how Gareth Box had opposed her attempts to introduce a Christian dimension to try and reflect in a domestic setting the spiritual simplicity she’d discovered in that tiny seaside church in North Wales – Gareth saying this was commercial suicide. At the same time knowing his hands were tied, because she was both the creative force and the figurehead. And now the inevitable split was looming, and Gareth was accusing her of being brainwashed by the Church, by this woman priest.

‘He found out about the money,’ Jenny said.

‘Money?’ It didn’t strike Jane at first.

‘The money. In the sack. Well, he was salting away what he could, knowing he didn’t have long before the golden goose flew the pen, shifting what money he could get his hands on, investing in other companies. So I thought… why not? And here was Merrily in a situation where male priorities were attempting to influence her better judgement, penetrating the sanctuary. And he found out. And then he wanted to know about Merrily, this woman priest who’d bewitched me. So when you arrived at his door, the bastard must’ve thought ’twas his birthday… in all kinds of ways.’

He didn’t touch me,’ Jane said quickly.

‘Would’ve happened Jane, if not the next time you met, then the time after that. The older he gets, the younger they get.’ Jenny Box tightened her white scarf around her head and neck. ‘Another destroyer. Starting off, I suppose, trying to get information out of you – anything he could use against me, to blackmail me or humiliate me. And then he’d release the poison. Like a serpent. And then, he’d bide his time, and he—’

‘She’ll give it back, you know.’ Jane didn’t want to hear this. ‘The money. She won’t keep it now.’

‘She’ll keep it,’ Jenny said.

‘No. Maybe you don’t know her as well as you think you do.’

‘I know him, Jane. I know him better than I ever… dreaded I would. I know where he came from. We’d better be getting back, it’s starting to rain again.’

Jane followed her, in a fog of self-dismay vaguely lit by a kind of tentative elation – a rare feeling when she’d been so very wrong about so much. She found she was almost relishing the cold rain on her face, a cleansing… she needed that. She felt – although she wasn’t sure the feeling was going to last – that she needed, in some way, to start again.

At the square, Jenny Box pointed at a long blue and white car parked in the line of vehicles directly opposite the Black Swan. ‘There you are, see, that’s my man. Humphries.’

‘That’s his car? But I’ve seen it loads of times…’

Jenny Box said, rather sadly, ‘When he realized who I was, he became most assiduous in his inquiries, perhaps anticipating regular work in the future. Came up with a lot of stuff I hadn’t asked for. Some of which was useful. Told me things about you, for instance.’

‘Me?’ Jane didn’t know whether to feel outraged or flattered.

‘About your dalliance in the various spiritual byways. The man seems like a buffoon, but he’s surprisingly good at what he does. Garrulous. Asks questions without you realizing they’re being asked.’

‘Is he as obvious as his car?’

‘Twice as obvious. He… I wanted to know about Underhowle, all right? When I read about Lodge, and when I heard on the radio news that Merrily was involved, I asked Humphries to find out what he could from his contacts. On an impulse, I paid him to go to Underhowle.’

God, what it must be like to have unlimited money. ‘Did you tell Mum what you were doing?’

Jenny Box shook her head.

‘I don’t think she’d be too happy about that,’ Jane said, ‘do you?’

‘Well, that’s what I was coming to see her about. Things he uncovered. Things I should’ve known. I’ve been more stupid than I can say. Do you know at all when she’ll be back?’

‘Could be anytime. She’s with Huw Owen. He’s a bit bonkers, to be honest. They could be there all night.’

‘Jane, listen… I hope I’ve convinced you – because I’ve embarrassed the hell out of myself – that I only want to help her.’

‘Well, yeah, but…’ Jane felt awkward. ‘It’s just… the Website? Uriel?’

‘Yes, I sent your mother’s name to be put on the Uriel Website. For people to pray for her. The Uriel Website’s an international site for promoting women’s spirituality, nothing at all sinister. I put her name on the site because it attracts a weight of prayer from all over the world, and that’s what she’s going to need, believe me. It’s a deep-embedded evil she’s confronting, and she needs the angels at her shoulder.’ Jenny Box stood on the edge of the square. The blur was gone. Certainty shimmered around her now. ‘So would you tell her to come and see me, please? Before Friday. Before she buries that man. Believe me, there’re things she very much needs to know.’

‘Sure, but—’

‘I wasn’t kidding before. Whatever kind of lunatic you think I am, I don’t care. This is an awful satanic thing, and it’s close to us all.’ Well, can’t you—?’

‘No, Jane, you’ve pushed me too far as it is. I won’t have this going out second-hand.’

Jane nodded soberly. ‘OK, I’ll… tell her to call you in the morning.’

‘Thank you, Jane.’

‘I’m sorry, OK?’

‘There’s nothing to be sorry about. Goodnight now. God bless you.’

‘Thanks.’ Jane turned away to walk home, past the forecourt by the entrance to the church, and saw the steeple rising from the middle of the ragged apple trees.

And then she turned back and called out, ‘Did you see it? Did you really see an angel?’

Jenny Box stopped, her white scarf slipping back. ‘Jane, it doesn’t matter what I saw. It was a personal experience. A confirmation. It’s nothing to do with anyone else. I’m not claiming to be Bernadette. I don’t care whether anyone believes me.’

‘You don’t understand what I’m asking, do you?’

Jenny came up to her. They were alone in front of the lychgate. Jane felt suddenly forlorn.

Jenny reached out and took both Jane’s hands in her own. Jenny’s hands were cold.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I saw it, Jane. And she was beautiful.’

41 A Rainy Night in Underhowle

HUW CONCLUDED, ‘In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, we pray that this building might be free from all powers of darkness, spirits of evil. Defend from harm, Lord, all who enter and leave through this door…’

The words dissipated, Merrily thought, like the smoke of a single cigarette. This was Huw going through the motions – never leave a possibly disturbed place unblessed.

Ingrid Sollars put all the hanging bulbs out of their misery before locking the Victorian oak door with one of the keys on a jailer’s ring. She pulled at the iron handle. ‘Sometimes it’s come open in the night.’

‘How do you mean?’ Merrily looked at Ingrid: scratched waxed jacket, practical slacks: a woman who looked like she could shoe horses and change oil filters. ‘How could that happen?’

‘It just has. I’m the one who usually locks it. I don’t make mistakes.’

Huw leaned an elbow on the small window ledge. ‘Still happening?’

‘Not for some months, but I still check.’

‘Rogue energy, happen?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘A church or chapel this size is an amplifier for energy, and when a place has been used for worship, it accumulates. When you take away the prayer, where’s it go? If it’s left derelict, the energy might turn negative. If the worship’s replaced by something antisocial or irreligious, it definitely will.’

Merrily stared at him. Did he actually believe that?

‘A spring-water bottling plant?’ Ingrid Sollars said sceptically.

‘Hmm.’ Huw inclined his head. ‘Would you happen to know who the people are who ran this enterprise, Ingrid?’

‘I do know them,’ Ingrid said guardedly. ‘They’re running a similar operation in the Usk Valley. Is it important?’

‘Think you could get them on the phone tonight?’

‘I could try.’ She opened the modern porch door. Outside it was raining. In the distance, Merrily could still hear a chant of Roddy’s Body OUT. It was irregular now and punctuated with laughter.

‘If you could do that,’ Huw said to Ingrid, ‘happen you could find out the name of the contractor who did the conversion.’

Merrily said, ‘What—?’

‘Meanwhile,’ Huw said, ‘there’s the other thing. Come on, now, Ingrid, you’ve been on the brink of telling us.’

Ingrid sighed. ‘Actually, Mr Owen, I’ve been hoping the person concerned would come over herself. I did ask her.’

‘People get coy sometimes, lass. Who is it?’

Ingrid hesitated. ‘A girl. Schoolgirl.’

‘Parents know?’

‘I think so.’

‘Where’s the problem, then? Not like we’re the police, is it?’

Merrily thought she’d rather face the police than Huw in this mood.

The mother wore a purple fleece top, crushed-velvet trousers, green-tinted hair and a gold nose-stud on a chain.

‘They were just having a bit of fun together,’ she said. ‘You’re only young once, aren’t you?’

You didn’t realize how much things had changed, Merrily thought, until you heard that from a parent. The attitude seemed to be that they were going to do it anyway, so why erect barriers? She thought about Jane and Eirion. Perhaps the most you could ask for was that your kids should wait until the age of consent and that there should then be a degree of emotional commitment.

Merrily wanted to get home. She felt cold and anxious.

Huw was clearly in no hurry. ‘So you found the door open?’ he said to the girl. He and Merrily were sharing a red leather sofa in the front room of number 27 Goodrich Close, where the central heating could have sustained tropical lizards. Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? was on TV; nobody had turned that down either.

‘I didn’t want to go in, right?’ Zoe Franklin said. ‘But Martin had been to the pub, and he was feeling brave.’

Zoe was a serious-minded girl, according to Ingrid Sollars. Doing A-level maths and sciences in Ross. University material. Not an imaginative girl – that was what Merrily thought Ingrid had been trying to convey. Zoe’s long-time boyfriend had been Martin Brinkley, two or three years older, a junior bank clerk and a good lad, generally.

‘If they wanted to keep people out, why didn’t they just lock it?’ Mrs Franklin demanded. She’d told them that Zoe’s dad and Zoe’s brother, Curtis, had gone on the Roddy Lodge demo. Pub, more likely, Mrs Franklin said.

Ingrid had said that Zoe’s mother wouldn’t have minded much if Zoe had stuck with Martin Brinkley, got herself pregnant and forgot about all this university rubbish, because that was likely to cost them, wasn’t it? Ingrid said Zoe’s parents were what you would have regarded as typical Underhowle parents. Typical, at least, of the pre-Fergus era.

‘What had you heard about the place, Zoe?’ Huw asked.

‘I thought it was all stupid.’ Zoe wore jeans and a T-shirt and an anxious expression. ‘It’s just one of those stories that goes around the school. It was supposed to be haunted and they said that when the ghost was there the door would be open. So if you tried the door – that’s the old oak door inside the porch – and opened for you, you could go in and… something would be waiting there.’

‘And what had people seen?’

‘Nothing, really. They just said you could feel it watching you.’

‘What did you feel?’

‘Martin, I’ll bet!’ Mrs Franklin said and rocked with laughter.

‘You wanner make us a cup of tea, Mam?’ Zoe said patiently.

‘I’m here as your responsible adult!’

‘Jesus,’ Zoe said, ‘that was when the police had Curtis in. This is the Church, for Christ’s sake! Please?’

Mrs Franklin stalked out and Zoe grabbed the remote and switched off the TV.

‘They wanted to sue the Development Committee because I had bruises. They thought they could make some money out of it. That’s why I didn’t say anything, except to Mrs Sollars. They didn’t believe the other stuff, anyway. Thought I was making it up. My parents can’t believe anybody actually tells the truth. Like, I was going to come and see you tonight, but I didn’t want any of them to know.’

‘The protesters?’ Merrily could stand the heat no longer and shrugged off her coat.

‘It’s all stupid,’ Zoe said. ‘It’s Mr and Mrs Lodge who are going to suffer. What’ve they ever done to anybody?’

It had been raining, and Zoe didn’t fancy going on the back of Martin’s motorbike in that kind of weather, thanks very much, and while they were thinking about what to do they’d gone into the chapel porch to shelter for a bit, and Martin had grinned and said, ‘I wonder if it’s open tonight.’

It was one of those myths that took hold: modern folklore, almost always passed on by children. Martin Brinkley had heard it from his younger brother, who said he’d heard it from a boy who’d gone in with his girlfriend and she’d been so frightened she’d let him do it.

Zoe had said ‘Don’t be stupid’ and ‘Let’s go’ and things like it that, but Martin had already had a pint in the pub with his mates and he was, you know, a bit skittish. He’d tried the door and… would you believe it? Hey!

Martin had gone in.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ Zoe had shouted from the porch.

Silence. Martin hadn’t come out.

‘Don’t be so bloody stupid!’ Zoe had cried.

And had taken a step inside – and, bang, the door had slammed behind her, and Zoe had screamed and Martin’s arms had come around her: Don’t be scared, I’m here. And she’d had to laugh, and then they’d started kissing and, you know…

Well, the door was open, look, and it wasn’t as if there was anything they could damage in there; the place was already gutted. But it was dry and cleaner than Zoe would have expected, and it wasn’t that cold and where else was there to go on a rainy night in Underhowle? So they’d fetched a rug from the box on Martin’s bike. Though, actually, the truth was that Zoe hadn’t liked it in there from the first, but what could she say without looking like a wimp?

‘Why exactly didn’t you like it, lass?’

‘It was… as if the walls had eyes, you know? As if they were bulging inwards to make sure they didn’t miss anything. You could, like, feel it, even though you couldn’t see much, just the light in the windows. Now I know that sounds stupid, but at one point, because I was so convinced someone was watching us, I made Martin put all the lights on, even though people might see them from outside.’

‘If it was me, I’d’ve been hoping people would see,’ Merrily said.

‘Yeah.’ Zoe smiled gratefully. ‘Actually, it was worse, somehow, with the lights on, because of all the shadows which made it seem like the walls really were swelling.’ She moved her hands in and out, like an accordionist. ‘You felt there was something there – inside there, with us – that wanted the lights on. So it could see us. So we put them out again.’

You didn’t actually see anything, though?’ Merrily asked.

‘No.’

‘What about the temperature? Did you feel it was especially cold? Colder in some areas than others, say?’

‘Maybe. I don’t know, really, it was all cold. I didn’t want to stop there at all, but Martin’s putting his arms round me, and he’d rolled up these dust sheets, which were fairly clean, and… Oh, I don’t have to talk about this stuff, do I?’

‘Of course not. We’d just like to know when anything happened that you… weren’t expecting.’

‘Yeah, well, I wouldn’t let him go any further, anyway. I said no, that’s it, I’ve had enough, this is stupid, and I got up to go. I remember getting up, and then…’ Zoe closed her eyes for a moment and, in the botanical-garden heat, Merrily actually saw goose bumps appear on the girl’s arms. ‘I was just thrown back, really roughly. Back on to the dust sheets – that’s when I got the bruises, yeah? And I wasn’t afraid then, so much as – you know – startled and angry. I’m like, Geddoff, you dull bugger!’

Merrily said, ‘Did you – when you were thrown back – feel anybody actually touch you?’

‘Yeah, I… I think so. But I didn’t really have time to, because I couldn’t breathe, you know? I was choking. There was suddenly this awful pressure on my throat.’

‘What kind of pressure, Zoe?’ Huw said. ‘What did you actually feel?’

Zoe rubbed her arms. ‘I couldn’t exactly say it was hands. I couldn’t say it felt like hands. But I thought of hands. I thought of these rough – what’s the word? – callused, kind of hands. And dirty. And what I heard – this was the very worst moment, I can tell you – I actually heard Martin’s voice. He was going, like, “What’s up with you? What you doing?” And his voice was like a long way away. I mean, what – five, six metres? And I’m trying to shout, scream… and all I could make were these little rattly noises, like snorting. And I was… absolutely… bloody terrified.’

‘I bet,’ Merrily said.

‘I thought I was gonner die. I thought I was gonner die there and then. You believe me?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re, like, a vicar, too, yeah?’

‘Mmm.’

‘And I’ll tell you something else. Martin, he en’t got hands like that. He works in a bank.’ Zoe nodded towards the door, lowered her voice. ‘They still don’t believe me. Not really. Sometimes I think I dreamed it. You know, that we fell asleep in there or something. But I can’t have. I wasn’t comfortable in there, you know, not from the start.’

‘What happened in the end, Zoe?’ Merrily asked.

‘Martin put the lights on and there was nothing there.’

‘How far were you from the lights?’

‘’Bout four metres.’

‘Could you still feel the pressure as he was putting the lights on?’

‘When the lights went on, I could breathe. It wasn’t Martin. It definitely wasn’t Martin. And there was nobody else in there, I swear to God.’

‘Did you have any marks on your neck, Zoe?’ Huw asked.

‘No. Well, redness maybe. But no bruises like you’d expect. Listen, can you tell me what happened? I’ve heard some of this stuff Mr Hall talks about, and I’m doing physics at A level, so… I mean, I’ve been trying to tell myself this was all caused by electromagnetism and radio waves on my brain. That maybe, like he says, there is some problem caused by like intersection of electrics from the power lines and signals from the TV booster and the mobile-phone transmitters…’

Merrily looked at Huw.

‘Aye,’ he said, ‘it’s possible.’

‘Then what are you doing here?’ Zoe said.

An old Land Rover was parked outside the house; its lights flashed once and a rear door opened for them.

Ingrid Sollars was at the wheel, Sam Hall next to her. ‘If this was daylight,’ he said, ‘you’d see the goddam pylon right at the back of the house, and you’d see the TV booster across the valley. The existing mobile-phone transmitter’s in the wood across there, and the big new one—’

Ingrid switched on the engine, creating foundry sounds. ‘This is the Reverend Owen, Sam, and I really don’t think he believes this begins and ends with electricity.’

‘More sick people on this estate than you could otherwise account for – how d’ya do, Reverend Owen? – and Melanie Pullman lived right over there, end of the turning circle.’

The turning circle was jammed with cars, so Ingrid Sollars had to reverse off the estate. She drove them back into the centre of the village, where a few people still hung around and the placard saying KEEP SATAN OUT! was propped against a lamp-post.

Sam leaned over the back of his seat. ‘Ingrid, of course, would actually prefer this whole thing to be down to Satan.’

Ingrid pulled in behind Merrily’s Volvo. ‘What he means is that Ingrid would prefer it not to have been caused by something the removal of which would damage the progress of this village out of the Dark Ages. We need communications, and we need all those computers, and we need the power to make them work. At the moment, a child as bright as Zoe Franklin is the exception in her age group. In ten years’ time she’ll be the norm.’

‘It’s the main source of argument between us,’ Sam said. ‘I don’t believe this is progress if it’s gonna kill off half the people and give the rest waking nightmares.’

‘That’s a ridiculous exaggeration.’

‘Sure it is – at present.’

Huw said, ‘You talk to the spring-water people, Ingrid?’

Ingrid switched off the engine. It subsided with noises like the collapsing of metal plates. ‘Yes, I did. I said the Development Committee had limited funds and would very much like to know the name of the contractors they employed in the original conversion.’

‘And?’

‘They said they didn’t have a phone number but they were pretty sure this particular contractor was… no longer available.’

‘I bet they couldn’t remember his name, either.’

Ingrid said, ‘What do you propose to do about this, Mr Owen?’

‘I intend to discuss it with my colleague here, who I hope will allow me to be involved in tomorrow’s funeral.’

‘Tomorrow?’

‘Don’t spread it around, eh?’

‘You’re a bastard, Huw.’ Merrily realized she was driving too fast and her foot stabbed the brake. The rain had stopped, but the night clouds hung low and sombre as the lights of Ross began to flower around them.

‘Me mam never tried to hide it,’ Huw said placidly.

‘For a start, you knew what Zoe was going to tell us.’

‘Ingrid told me about it while you were messing with the TV people. She didn’t give me the name then, though.’

‘But you had to make the kid go through it again.’

‘Cathartic, lass. Anyroad, I wanted you to hear it. You might not’ve believed me. A few tools disappearing and a bloke punched off a ladder doesn’t amount to much. I wanted you to feel that sense of being watched. And the rest of it.’

‘It doesn’t prove anything.’

‘Nothing’s ever proven.’

Merrily drove slowly through the medieval centre of Ross, behind the ancient sandstone market house, the church rising on her left, roofs glistening.

‘You even knew who the contractor was.’

‘The good Mumford and his contacts,’ Huw said. ‘Ear to the ground, that lad. A respectable spring-water firm would hardly like it broadcast. Nobody wants to be known as having employed him, having been to the pub with him a time or two, and certainly not—’

‘You wasted Ingrid’s time.’

I wanted her to hear it, and I wanted you to hear it from her.’ ‘Because you didn’t want me to think it was all down to you.’

Huw said nothing.

‘Which it is, of course.’

‘Who else cared enough?’ Huw said.

Consider, Huw said.

Consider Cromwell Street, Gloucester: a street full of flats and bedsits and therefore young people in need of cheap accommodation, coming and going, moving out and moving in. And the top rooms in number twenty-five were the cheapest of the lot. Police had actually traced about a hundred and fifty former tenants, some of whom had paid no more than a fiver a week.

So it was a haven for itinerant kids, some of whom might otherwise be sleeping in cardboard boxes in shop doorways. Some actually said it was the happiest, safest time of their adult lives, being in Cromwell Street, being part of Fred and Rose’s big family, with all that this involved. Looked back on it with real nostalgia.

Strange. And yet not so strange.

Because it was an organism, was 25 Cromwell Street, Huw said, and Fred loved it for that. It was end-of-terrace, tall and narrow – three storeys, plus cellars, plus attics – built like a person. And Fred knew all its private parts: where the wires went, where the pipes went.

He liked to feel the presence of the bodies in there, bodies live and dead. Bodies became part of the fabric of that place, said Huw, who had studied it all in nauseating depth. Bodies, not people, because Fred basically was not interested in people, only their bodies.

25 Cromwell Street: a bargain flophouse, a free brothel and a burial chamber, and Fred loved it. Loved messing with it, altering this and that, contriving, bodging. He turned one room into a primitive cocktail bar – the Black Magic Bar, they called it, with optics on the bottles and a big mural of a Caribbean ‘beachscape. It was the first real house he’d ever owned; got it for seven grand, but it needed renovation; it needed a builder, needed him. And he’d keep working on it whenever he had the time: extending it, building new bits, fabricating this, concreting that. Building himself into that house. Putting his consciousness into it.

Such as it was.

Fred’s consciousness was basement stuff, Huw said. Fred thought about sex all the time, talked about sex most of the time he was awake.

And if the walls in 25 Cromwell Street all had eyes, they were Fred’s eyes. Eyes and ears: microphones and speakers, video cameras, so Fred could absorb the sights and sounds of sex – squeals of ecstasy upstairs, sobs of fear and despair in the cellars, the dungeons. 25 Cromwell Street throbbed with it. The house that Fred built, full of Fred’s porno pictures, Fred’s porno videos, Fred’s tools. And the dead.

‘And they knocked it down,’ Huw said. ‘That were all they could think of to do with it afterwards. There was talk of having a memorial garden, for the victims, but nobody wanted to be reminded what had happened there.’

So the council had knocked it down and built a walkway, with street lamps, so that nobody would know it had even been there. So you could walk past where it had been, walk over it, as a short cut to the centre of Gloucester. They’d turned it into another small extension to the old Roman street plan that still lay at the heart of the city – one of the best-preserved Roman street patterns anywhere in Britain. Glevum, the Roman name for Gloucester, meant place of light.

The darkest corner of the place of light: gone. But where had Fred gone? The man who was so attached to the flesh and to gadgets and tools and working with his hands; the man with no morals, no sensitivity, no spark of spirituality.

A one-man definition of the term ‘earthbound’.

Where was Fred? The man who remained unconvicted, who had cheated justice, who was said to have sat in his cell, between interrogations, and dreamed of Cromwell Street.

Where was whatever remained of Fred?

‘This is crazy,’ Merrily said.

‘Is it? You know about Lodge. You’ve been in his bungalow. You’ve seen his facsimile of the Black Magic Bar. You’ve seen the buried cuttings and the photo of him and Lynsey Davies on the sofa, posing like Fred and Rose. All I know is, lass, there were too much holding him to Cromwell Street and they took it away. First, they took his kids away, then they took the dead away. And they took him away, and he couldn’t cope with that. And then, when he was dead and burned and sprinkled over Much Marcle, they took the house itself away… his creation.’

‘Huw…’ Merrily was finding it hard to breathe. ‘This is a notorious killer of the lowest kind who—’

‘I don’t believe you can lay a man like that so easily to any kind of rest. I expected traces—’

‘—Who, in the end, avoided the processes of the law—’

‘I expected traces in the fields at Marcle, but I should’ve realized – he didn’t like it there because it was a village and everybody knew your business. He liked to watch, not be watched.’

‘—And now nobody can get at him,’ Merrily said. ‘All the relatives of the dead denied justice. All the relatives of the missing who’ll never know for sure… never.’

‘No,’ Huw said.

‘And nobody can get at him. Except…’ She was gripping the wheel tightly with both hands. ‘… Except, perhaps, for you, and I wonder what the Christian Deliverance Study Group would think of whatever you have in mind.’

Huw didn’t reply. Merrily drove slowly over Wilton Bridge towards the bypass, and the moon edged out for a moment and glimmered in the Wye.

42 Vampires

THE VAN PULLS up in the Tesco car park, where it backs on to the bus station, just the other side of the little wall, and Jane sees him getting out and she has to smile.

Coming towards her, pointing with his stubby right forefinger, a loose semi-grin on his face, plastic carrier bag hanging from his left hand. He’s actually not bad-looking in the right light, for his age, in this gypsyish sort of way. In this earthy sort of way, which you’d probably call ‘coarse’ if you were snobby and middle-class and buttoned-up, which Jane definitely is not.

‘Well, well,’ he says, ‘I thought it was you!’

Jane’s been waiting for her bus to Ledwardine, and it’s late and there’s nobody else waiting in the North Hereford queue, and in fact she was beginning to wonder if she’d missed it. Bugger. Going to be late, so she needs to ring Mum, but she’s left the mobile at home again, and if she goes off to phone and the bus comes, she’ll be stuffed.

‘How you doing, then, girl?’

‘I’m OK, Fred. You?’

‘Busy. Up to the eyes, as usual, look, but that en’t no bad thing.’ Looking her up and down, with the old saucy wink. ‘You’ve grown, en’t you? How old you now?’

‘Seventeen.’ Jane rolls her eyes. ‘Over the hill.’

He smirks in delight. ‘Well, don’t seem no time at all, do it, since we done your bathroom, took out the ole shower? Had a good laugh then, di’n’t we? How’s your ma? Still doin’ the ole…?’ Miming the dog collar like it’s got a ball and chain attached.

‘Well… She’s probably OK now, at this moment,’ Jane says doubtfully. ‘But she’ll be mad as hell if it turns out I’ve missed this bus and she’s late for her communion class.’

‘Missed your bus, is it? Bugger.’

‘It’s OK, there’ll be another three in about two hours.’

‘Well now, hang on…’ He purses his lips, thinking. ‘Just you hang on a mo, Jane… Ledwardine, ennit? I’m off up to wosser- name… Weobley, look. So how far’s that from Ledwardine? No distance, is it, if we goes back along the ole Brecon road – no time at all. Hey, listen, I got Rose in the van, too. You en’t met Rose, did you?’

Jane’s actually curious to know what Fred’s wife’s like, the way he went on about her, this great big bundle of fun, always ready for a laugh, day or night, know what I mean?

But in the van, when Jane gets in – it’s actually quite decent of him to do this; she knows what he’s like, always on the go, always another job lined up, do anything for anybody – Rose doesn’t seem like that at all. Bit frumpy, actually. Got this kind of high, whiny voice. Still, she seems friendly enough, in her way. Just not as instantly outgoing as Fred, as is often the case with wives of really extrovert guys.

Fred’s leaning across, apologizing to Rose. ‘Now I know you won’t mind, my love, not really, but we gotter drop Jane off in Ledwardine. Take us n’more’n five minutes out of our way, I promise. You all right in the back there, Jane? If you moves them tools, in the black bag, there’s an ole mattress, be more comfortable for you. That’s it.’

The van rattling out of Hereford now and into the country up towards Stretton Sugwas, Rose taking the occasional glance back at Jane, to make sure she’s OK in the back. There’s a strong smell of oil in here, and sweat. A working van. Jane remembers the problem with Fred is he’s always working so hard he doesn’t get that much time for baths, as he was the first to admit when he was putting in their new shower at the vicarage. ‘Oughter ’ave a quick one now, Jane – test him out, look. You wanner get in there with me, scrub me back?’ he’d said. Little grin and a wink to show he didn’t really mean it. Totally faithful to Rose, is Fred – not that he don’t get a few offers, mind. Beggin’ for it, some of these housewives, have you up the ole stairs in no time at all, you don’t watch it.

‘So how’s wossername, the Welsh boy, Irene?’ Calling back over his shoulder as he drives. ‘You still goin’ with him? You know what they says about the Welsh? That true, Jane, you found out yet? I bet you bloody ’ave, girl, I seen the look in your eyes. You all right back there? Sorry about the state. Tell you what, I’ll move that ole…’

The van stops.

Jane notices he’s pulled off the road and driven through an open field gate and, looking between the front seats, through the windscreen, she can see that there’s a thick hedge now between the van and the road, and she’s thinking, Why are we… ? What’s he stopping for? They haven’t been on the road five minutes. Then the rear doors creak open and Fred climbs in with her. He’s wearing his old overalls; the smell of sweat is very strong now.

He’s holding a roll of wide, brown tape that he’s pulled from the tool bag.

He isn’t smiling any more. He’s got this intent look on his face, like when he was sizing up the bathroom wall, working things out. There are little points of light so far back in his bulblike eyes, it’s as if they’re actually shining from somewhere inside his brain.

‘What are you… ?’ An amazed fear shoots up through Jane’s body.

And with that first lilt of it in her voice, she sees that something has happened. The little lights have filled up Fred’s eyes, making them glow as if they’re veined with filaments, and his teeth are bared. The whole atmosphere in the van has changed, become charged, Fred and Rose connecting now like jump leads on a battery, sparks bouncing between them.

Then this great big bunched fist, knuckles like ball-bearings, thrusts up like a greased piston on a machine and smacks Jane thunderously in the mouth. She can feel the blow echoing in her skull.

Then there’s this kind of time-lapse and the next thing she’s on her back tasting salty blood, smelling this overwhelming sweat smell – Fred on top of her taping her wrists together, his lips drawn back, teeth set in concentration, breath coming in efficient little spurts.

And then, satisfied with his wrist-taping, he’s saying, ‘You di’n’t ’ave no dad to show you what’s what, did you, Jane? Me and Rose gonner help you out now, look. Be thankin’ us, you will, you and that Welsh boy, wossername, Irene. Show you what’s what, where the bits goes, you little smart bitch…’

Merrily spasmed and jerked up in bed. The light was still on, and Happy like Murderers was spread spine-up on the duvet.

It was ten past two in the morning, and the experience had been so shatteringly vivid that she had to get out of bed and go rushing up to Jane’s apartment, to stand panting in the doorway, listening to the kid’s breathing.

Afterwards, at the top of the stairs, she felt so faint that she had to go down on her knees, head in her hands. Her hair was matted, her skin felt like latex, and she’d have to have a shower, even if it sent the pipes into a strangled symphony.

Under the water, she relived the unspeakable, through the split consciousness in the dream that had been scripted by her reading – the absolute insanity of reading that stuff until sleep had blurred the filth.

In the dream, part of her had been Jane, and yet she was there, too, invisible and helpless, as Jane’s mum.

Knowing what Jane could not know – knowing what was going to happen. What had happened, over and over again: Fred and Rose feeding off fear.

Sexual vampires.

Merrily thought about the mothers of the known victims, all the stricken mothers who had to read about it, had to know, had to be there with their daughters, at least once, in the greasy, blood-smelling, semen-smelling darkness.

In Fred and Rose’s cellar, which was not there any more.

A one-man definition of the term ‘earthbound’.

Was it conceivable that whatever had been inside Fred, whatever had ignited the bilious filaments of evil in those eyes, could be passed on, could jump – the way the electricity had jumped into Roddy Lodge from live coils around the insulators on the pylon – into someone receptive?

And was it – as some deeply troubled part of Huw might need it to be – something beyond the human?

Wearing a clean white T-shirt under her towelling robe, Merrily crept up the stairs to check on Jane again.

The kid had seemed to be genuinely asleep when she and Huw had arrived back at the vicarage just after midnight. Behind the front door, they’d found a brown paper bag containing a white, hardbacked notebook labelled The Magickal Diary of Lynsey Davies, and a note from Lol that said: It’s all here. You don’t even need to read between the lines.

When she’d shown Huw to his room, he’d taken the diary with him. She wondered what his nightmares had been like.

As she stood looking down at Jane she thought the kid’s eyes opened briefly. But then they closed again and she turned over onto her side, and Merrily slipped out.

She stopped by the top landing window with its view through the trees to the village square and the all-night lantern on the front of the Black Swan. And then she knelt, in her long white T-shirt, and prayed for guidance, slow and intense, from far inside herself, inside her heart-centre, in the emotional silences back there.