The Lamp of the Wicked

43 Fun Palace

IT WAS DOWN at the bottom of Ross town centre, among a cluster of antique shops, and still hard to find. It had a door with no glass and one narrow window with no actual books in it, just a small sign on a greying card.

Piers Connor-Crewe Bookseller

Frannie Bliss found the discretion interesting. ‘Porn. Gorra be. How else is he gonna make any kind of a living?’

‘Word of mouth,’ Merrily said. ‘The Internet. You can turn over a week’s income on about four books, if you know what you’re doing – so I’m told.’

‘We’re not talking John Grisham here, are we?’ Bliss pushed at the door; it didn’t give.

‘Try the bell, Frannie.’

‘Hard porn – mark my words.’ Bliss pressed a black button in the white door. ‘I’ve been summoned, by the way.’

‘Fleming?’ Merrily looked up the hill towards the Market House, where clouds were massing like bonfire smoke. It was not yet eleven a.m.

‘It was only a matter of time. He knew I was still around – well, obviously. Wants to see me in Hereford at four this afternoon, which is ominous – anything heavy, you say it late afternoon. Limits the victim’s options. He thinks, Aw, sod it, I’ll go and get pissed instead. I’m guessing formal suspension this time.’

‘What sort of case have they got for that?’

‘He’s been heard to say, “If Bliss wants to be a private eye, I’m not going to hold him back any longer.” And he’ll have stuff going way back. I never claimed to be the divisional Mr Popular.’

‘What does Kirsty say?’

‘Kirsty left last night, Merrily. Back to the farm. With the kids.’

‘Frannie, no…’

The door opened. A woman of maybe twenty-six stood there. ‘Sorry, we’re a bit behind this morning.’ She had short hair bleached white and a silver ring in her left eyebrow.

Bliss smiled bleakly at her. ‘Mr Connor-Crewe in, is he?’ Like he hadn’t phoned first, to make sure of it.

‘He’s unpacking some books upstairs, if you want to hang around for a couple of minutes… You trade?’

‘Collector,’ Bliss said. ‘Beano annuals, mainly.’

‘Yeah?’

Bliss flashed his card. ‘DI Bliss, West Mercia.’

‘Oh, right.’ She seemed unsurprised. ‘Go through, officer.’

‘Ta.’

They went in, Merrily holding the plastic carrier bag with Hereford Cathedral on it. The window had been deceptive; the building was narrow but deep, a darkening tunnel of shelves. Arrowed signs indicated two other floors. The woman stood at the bottom of some narrow wooden stairs.

‘Hey… you know Mumford?’

‘So this is where he gets his first editions.’

She grinned. ‘I’ll tell Piers. So it’s DI… ?’

‘Bliss. And, er…’

‘Merrily Watkins,’ Merrily said, thinking, Cola French?

The white-haired woman stopped on the second step, turned with a hand on the rail and inspected her. Merrily wore her best coat over the black cowl-neck sweater, the cross concealed. ‘Yeah,’ the woman said sadly. ‘Oh well.’ And carried on upstairs, leaving Bliss peering curiously at Merrily.

‘If you go straight down, you’ll find an alcove on your left, with some chairs,’ Cola French called back. ‘Criminal History’s right at the bottom. But, er… Theology’s in the cellar.’

‘Bound to have read them all, anyway,’ Merrily said.

What bothered Merrily most was that she hadn’t seen Jane, not to speak to. She’d overslept, and it had been nearly nine a.m. when she’d staggered into the kitchen to find a note on the table.

Mum, I’ve gone.

Just in case you’re vaguely interested, it’s Lol’s gig tonight at the Courtyard. So I’ve taken a change of clothes with me and I’ll carry on to Hereford on the school bus. If you don’t make it there later I’ll just have to thumb a lift back or something, so don’t let it interfere with your spiritual schedule or anything.

J.

And Jenny Box called. She’d like to talk to you. You should.

‘She wouldn’t actually thumb a lift, of course,’ Merrily had said later to Huw. ‘This is just a gentle dig.’

‘With a bayonet,’ Huw said.

‘No, for Jane, this is a gentle dig.’

Huw had refused to eat breakfast or to drink tea. He’d drunk one glass of water. Was this a fast, purification, in anticipation of… what?

Merrily had eaten half a slice of toast and felt guilty. Then she’d gone into the scullery and looked up the number for Ingrid Sollars. She had in front of her Lol’s note, which said, The PCC mentioned in the diary is Piers Connor-Crewe. If you feel you have to go and see him, please don’t go on your own. This morning, Lol had phoned, filling in some gaps, bless him.

The phone at Ingrid’s place had been picked up by Sam Hall, which didn’t surprise her a lot. Merrily had asked Sam some straight questions about his former colleague on the Underhowle Development Committee.

Before leaving the vicarage, she’d left a message on Prof’s answering machine asking if Lol, or even Prof himself, could keep an eye open for Jane tonight. Left a similar message on their own machine for the kid to pick up if she rang in. Just in case this situation proved more complex.

As now seemed likely.

Piers Connor-Crewe, plump and moon-faced and cheerful, wore his baggy cream suit over a denim shirt with a frayed collar. One of those men, Merrily thought, who might greet you in pyjamas, always confident that you’d be blinded by the aura of his personality, his intellect.

‘Merrily Watkins, how nice. And back in your role as consultant to the Herefordshire Constabulary.’

Bliss stood up. ‘DI Francis Bliss. We haven’t met.’

‘No, indeed – I’m afraid I was working late the night you encountered the Committee.’

Connor-Crewe went to sit behind the desk, which filled half of this dimly lit airspace between bookshelves. He motioned Bliss and Merrily to a couple of battered smokers’ chairs. The alcove seemed to serve as his office. There was a phone on the desk, a vintage, crane-necked electric lamp and a large book on Roman pottery.

‘Well now,’ he said, ‘if this is about what I think it’s about, let me first apologize that the police were not informed about last night’s demonstration. However’ – he opened his hands – ‘neither was the Committee. Seems to have been entirely impromptu – grass-roots protest – therefore, any damage is—’

‘Not why we’re here,’ said Bliss. ‘We’ve come to ask your advice about a book. Whether you think it’s authentic, that kind of thing.’

Piers Connor-Crewe inclined his big head to one side and raised an eyebrow. Bliss turned to Merrily, who placed her Hereford Cathedral carrier bag on the desk and extracted the white book: The Magickal Diary of Lynsey D.

Piers leaned over and looked at it but didn’t touch it. ‘And where did you acquire this, Inspector Bliss?’

‘Pick it up if you like, sir.’

‘Oh, dear me, no. One never knows about journals like this.’

Bliss turned to Merrily. ‘What’s he mean by that, Mrs Watkins?’

‘I think he means there might be some sort of protective curse around it.’

‘Like King Tut’s tomb.’

‘That sort of thing.’

‘No problem, then, for a man like me with bugger-all left to lose.’ Bliss opened the book, turned it round to face Connor- Crewe, pulled the lamp over, switched it on and directed its cuplike shade at the page. The light illuminated one of the pages of complex-looking tables and correspondences, all meticulously drawn in different-coloured inks.

‘What’s this about, sir? What are all these funny little squiggly things?’

Connor-Crewe coughed. ‘Those would be sigils, inspector. What one might call condensed spells. Configurations of particular desires, alphabetically and numerically reduced to their basics for, ah, intensity of focus.’

‘Spells.’

‘This is what might be described as someone’s magical wishlist.’

‘Would you be able to decode it yourself, sir?’

‘Possibly, to an extent. Given time.’

‘You’re an expert on the occult, then?’

‘In a largely academic way. There’s a very significant international trade in old books on ceremonial magic and ritual. Something no antiquarian dealer can afford to ignore.’

‘You handle a lot of them?’

‘It probably accounts for up to twenty per cent of my trade. Perhaps even more.’

But you didn’t want to handle this one.’

Connor-Crew smiled. ‘When I said that, I was being a little ironic. The so-called magical diary—’

‘Because you knew where this one had been?’

‘The magical diary is a very personal and private document, often considered to be a magical tool in itself.’

‘I see.’

‘I’m not sure you do, inspector, but I don’t suppose it matters, in a strictly forensic sense.’

‘So you’ve never seen this before?’

‘Occasionally one appears on the market but in the case of this one I can safely say… no.’

‘But you did know its owner.’

‘Oh? Did I?’

‘My information is that she was a regular customer who even helped out here sometimes. In one way or another.’

Connor-Crewe flipped the book shut and glanced at the cover. ‘Ah. Of course.’

Bliss smiled like a wintry sun. ‘You remember.’

‘Poor woman,’ said Connor-Crewe.

‘What exactly was your relationship with the late Lynsey Davies?’

‘Bookseller and customer.’

‘Sleep with many of your customers, sir?’

Connor-Crewe sighed. ‘Some.’

Merrily blinked.

‘Inspector, a bookseller is not like other retailers. A good book-seller will very quickly develop an intimacy with his regular clients, based on his feeding of their intellectual desires. And if it should progress beyond that level, well… if there’s an element of misconduct that might apply in the case of, say, a doctor and patient, then I’m afraid I’m not aware of anything similar concerning the book trade.’

‘You’re a slippery bastard, aren’t you, sir?’ Bliss said.

Connor-Crewe frowned.

Bliss said, ‘Lynsey sometimes lived with you at The Old Rectory, is that correct?’

‘Occasionally stayed with me would be more correct. Overnight.’

‘Quite a formidable woman?’

‘That’s fair comment.’

‘Been around.’

‘I wouldn’t doubt it.’

Bliss tapped the book. ‘Who taught who about this stuff?’

Connor-Crewe thought about it. ‘When she first came to me for magical literature, I would say her knowledge was, at best, rudimentary. But she had the persistence and, it would seem, the time to devote to the subject. After a year or two, I would say that her knowledge – certainly her practical ability – far out-weighed mine.’

‘Practical ability,’ Merrily said. ‘Mmm.’

Connor-Crewe smiled at her, with indulgence. ‘We may be getting into areas, Merrily, that you, as a Christian, would find repugnant. Let me remind you, however, that magic is an entirely legal discipline that functions these days all over the free world, largely unhampered by the secrecy that stifled it for centuries. Yes, I have practised magic. It’s a wonderful mental exercise. It expands the being.’

Bliss turned to Merrily. ‘That’s put you in your place, vicar.’ ‘It’s no big secret, inspector. There are even a number of further-education seminars on ritual magic at various colleges.’

‘But what you’re saying,’ Merrily said, ‘is that, while you have an extensive theoretical knowledge of esoteric practices, Lynsey Davies was what you might call a natural.’

Connor-Crewe looked pained. ‘She was a strong-willed woman who was able to summon, to an enviable degree, the kind of concentration required for the visualization exercises that are crucial to the successful practice of magic.’

‘By successful,’ Bliss said, ‘you mean actually making things happen.’

‘I would say, rather, helping to move events towards the most satisfactory conclusion.’

Frannie Bliss nodded doubtfully. ‘But to go back to my earlier question – where did she get it from? Did she suddenly show up at your shop and say, “Here, Piers, I fancy a go at that – you gorra couple of basic primers on the shelf?” ’

‘Now look…’ Connor-Crewe leaned back, arms folded across his chest. His normally generous mouth had shrunk into an expression of petulance. ‘I’ve been patient with you, Inspector Bliss, but I think that, before I answer any more of these questions, I have a right to ask you what this is all about.’

‘Mr Crewe, I thought this was understood. I’m investigating a murder.’

‘Whose?’

‘You tell me,’ Bliss said. ‘Maybe there are some I don’t know about.’

Lol had been aware of Prof Levin watching him for some minutes.

‘You’re beginning to worry me,’ Prof said.

Lol put the electric tuner back in its case. The Washburn was now in tune with the Boswell. He’d keep tuning them through the day.

‘It’s the fear,’ Prof said.

Lol had run through three songs in the studio – ‘The River Frome Song’, ‘Kivernoll’ and the acidic rocker ‘Heavy Medication Day’. He figured that was going to be enough. This, after all, was a Moira Cairns concert. He thought the songs, which nobody would ever have heard before, had sounded acceptable – just.

‘Where’s the fear?’ Prof demanded. ‘What have you done with the fucking fear?’

Lol looked up. He was alone on the studio floor. Prof was up behind the mixing board. Moira had gone into Ledbury to buy some things and bring back some lunch for them. Lol had been running through the songs and, at the same time, wondering what correlation there might be between magic and the side effects of electricity experienced by people like Mephisto Jones and Roddy Lodge.

‘This will do you no good, Laurence.’

‘What won’t?’

‘Popping pills so far in advance. I was hoping you might make it without them. But eight, nine hours before you go on… believe me, this is not professional.’

Lol contemplated the ceiling.

‘Then what’s the matter with you?’ Prof came down to the studio floor. He was wearing his King of the Hill T-shirt with a cardigan over the top. ‘It’s twenty years, give or take, since you last did this. You were a boy then, now you’re a man approaching middle age. My advice – and I’ve seen this before, with other people, although not in such an extreme situation as yours – is to do the screaming now – but not so hard you damage your voice. Because, if you bottle it up until just before you go on, you’re gonna balls this big time… throw it all away… pouf! Hey, you listening to me?’

Lol said, ‘Prof… Mephisto Jones… You think he’d mind if I phoned him?’

Frannie Bliss said, ‘I don’t know much about sex magic, but I do know that Lynsey had quite a reputation locally as a bit of a goer. Which might explain what attracted her to this particular discipline, as distinct from, say, Transcendental Meditation or the Jehovah’s Witnesses.’

‘Stupid and simplistic assumption,’ Connor-Crewe said.

Bliss nodded. ‘Do you know much about Lynsey’s early life? Did you know, for instance, that she went to college in Gloucester and then dropped out after less than six months and became a prostitute in the city?’

‘I do a certain amount of business in Gloucester,’ Connor- Crewe said. ‘Not that kind.’

‘Not a career prostitute, as such,’ Bliss said. ‘But she needed money and somewhere dry to sleep and eventually, like many other hard-up young folk in Gloucester in the 1970s and 1980s, she found this dead convenient place not far from the centre. Cheapest in the city, it was said.’

Merrily was aware of movement behind the shelves: either there were mice, or Cola French was listening.

‘Specializing in accommodation for… shall we say, liberal- minded young things,’ Bliss said. ‘The Gloucester fun palace. Perfect refuge for a big girl who liked trampling on taboos.’

‘Inspector, what are you—?’

‘We don’t know how long she was living there, but she seems to have fitted into the domestic arrangements all too well. Really took to it, you know? The atmosphere of tolerance.’

Merrily said, ‘You could form meaningful friendships there, with one another and also with the proprietors. If you didn’t like the idea of that, you probably left quite soon, or—’

‘Or you stayed until someone dug you out,’ Bliss said. ‘Sorry, uncalled for. But if you don’t know what we’re talking about now, you must’ve been so stuck into the old books that you never read a single newspaper in the mid-1990s.’

Connor-Crewe’s football face darkened. ‘If you’re telling me that Lynsey Davies spent some time at 25 Cromwell Street—’

‘No,’ Bliss said, ‘I’m asking if you knew she’d been at 25 Cromwell Street.’

‘The answer to that is no.’

‘Of course,’ Bliss said, ‘the vast majority of people could’ve had absolutely no idea how far it went with Fred and Rose. But we do know that one or two of the residents, over the years, had a strong interest in various occult practices of a kind probably not demonstrated at most colleges of further education. So it seems not unlikely that it was there that Lynsey was first introduced to the concept of sexual magic.’

‘If she was there.’

‘Take it from me,’ Bliss said. ‘Or take it from this.’ He stabbed the diary with a thumb.

‘Inspector Bliss…’ Connor-Crewe’s smile was like elastic, overstretched. ‘I wouldn’t take anything from that account. My experience of magical diaries is that they contain a considerable amount of fantasy. Often less a record of what actually happened than a rather faulty memoir of what the diarist would like to have happened. And I have to say—’

‘You’d have to be a strange kind of person, sir, to fantasize that you’d been to Cromwell Street and had a sexual relationship with the mass murderer Frederick West.’

‘I have to say that I do not see what possible bearing any of this could have on the presumed murder of Melanie Pullman.’

‘Did I mention Miss Pullman, sir?’

‘No, but—’

‘So stop trying to change the subject. You see, my information is that, for Lynsey Davies, the period at Cromwell Street was the most exciting time of her life. A lot of youngsters said something similar. Must’ve been a terrible comedown when she had to leave.’

‘Then why did she?’

‘Well, I’m only guessing here,’ Bliss said, ‘but I’d imagine that, at some stage, Lynsey saw the writing on the wall. Not Fred’s writing – Rose’s. Rose had lesbian tendencies and girls were often shared. Rose was a bully, and this was Rose’s house. In Lynsey, you’ve gorra big girl with a forceful personality – not the kind to be used as a plaything. Fred and Rose… I think it’s fair to say that, under different circumstances, it could just as easily have been Fred and Lynsey. Maybe there just wasn’t room for two big, insatiable women.’

Piers Connor-Crewe listened without uttering a word, as if his interest was academic. Piers was useful, Sam Hall had said on the phone, because he had extensive marketing know-how, having been in publishing, and of course he knew a great deal about ancient and Roman history. In the background Merrily had heard Ingrid saying brusquely, ‘Man fancies himself as Nero, if you ask me.’

‘So there we are, sir,’ Bliss said. ‘For Lynsey, the end of a golden era. The most excitement she’d ever had. And now she’s got to go back to the boring old Forest of Dean.’

‘As I understood it,’ Connor-Crewe said, ‘she had a relationship with a man, and at least one child.’ Which she seems to have rehomed, like with kittens – she was very good at that, apparently. Then she came to work in Ross – as a barmaid, I think – where she pursued her interest in the dark arts, acquiring some books from this little treasure house and usually paying, I’m told, in kind.’

Connor-Crewe’s eyes flared. ‘That’s—’

‘Irrelevant. The point is you had a relationship with her, founded on a mutual interest in the occult, whether commercial or private, and she spent time at your old rectory, full of bedrooms… which, in a strange kind of way, must’ve rekindled a few happy memories for Lynsey, perhaps sparked a few ideas.’

Connor-Crewe’s hand came down hard on the desk. ‘That is an utterly outrageous—’

‘Piece of gossip in the village of Underhowle,’ said Bliss. ‘Mr Connor-Crewe and his house parties and all those young guests.’

‘I think I ought to telephone my solicitor, don’t you?’

‘The ubiquitous Mr Nye, sir? Who is perhaps not quite as young as he looks, and probably likes a good party himself.’

‘And is doubtless well acquainted with the law relating to slander.’

Bliss looked blank. ‘What did I say?’

‘I think you accused me of allowing Lynsey Davies to use my home to recreate whatever filth took place twenty years ago in Cromwell Street.’

‘I think that’s your dirty mind at work, sir, but if you say so… Anyway, Ms Davies soon became interested in another property.’

Bliss flicked over a couple of pages in the magical diary. In between the impenetrable esoteric formulae, the text was an uneven record of what Lynsey considered to be significant episodes in her ‘spiritual development’. These entries, at least, were very clear – hand-printed and phrased in a schoolgirlish mixture of the colloquial, the portentous and the breathless prose of the romantic pulp novel.

We have been bound together by the stars and I knew we would meet again and so it has come to pass! Saw him in Ross yesterday, after ten years, and it turns out he’s working locally, and he took me to see the Place, which he says he has already become attached to. I was immediately picking up a powerful energy there and feel certain it’s on the sight of pagan Roman worship with blood sacrifice. We could do really incredible stuff there, the two of us, to reawaken the power. It is just mindblowing how things work out just when you need a buzz in your life.

‘Who’s she talking about here, Mr Crewe?’

‘Once again, why would I know?’

‘Because if she was in Underhowle I think you’d have known about it. And what she was doing. I take it you know which building she’s referring to.’

‘I can only guess the Baptist chapel.’

‘Where I understand you yourself have discovered Roman remains. Was it you who told Lynsey it was the site of an ancient Roman temple?’

‘I may have done. It’s an interest of mine.’

‘And was it an interest of hers?’

‘She was interested in anywhere she thought might have been used for ancient and mysterious rituals. She was… romantic, in that way.’

Merrily thought about Jane, who would also have been fascinated. Would have, once. She said, ‘Lynsey seems to have been very excited by the idea that the site was used for blood sacrifices. Did you tell her that?’

‘I doubt it. I told you, my interest is largely academic. It may have been, say, a Mithraic temple, but nothing’s been found there to suggest that. So why would I have told her something for which there was no archaeological evidence?’

‘You might just have enjoyed getting her excited,’ Bliss said mildly, and Connor-Crewe came out of his chair.

I… have… taken… enough of this mélange of ill-informed speculation and cheap innuendo!’ He gripped the desk, leaning across. ‘So you… can either get to the point or get out.’

Frannie Bliss didn’t move. ‘Imagine how Lynsey feels… when she finds that this ancient site of pagan rites and blood sacrifice is currently the workplace of her favourite builder, sex maniac, amateur abortionist and… who knows what else she knew about him? Anyway, the man who’d given her the times of her life ten years earlier… and this time no wife around. Just the two of them.’

Connor-Crewe sat down, with his arms folded, gazing beyond Bliss at the walls of books. ‘I know nothing about this.’

Bliss said, ‘The indications in the diary are that the atmosphere of the place sparked something off between them. See, this was a woman fascinated with the high priest of sex magic, the late Aleister Crowley, self-styled Great Beast of the 1920s or whenever it was, who…’ He faltered. ‘… Who Merrily knows more about than me.’

Especially after last night’s lengthy examination of the diary with Huw; Crowley was another guy you could learn too much about. Merrily sighed.

‘He and West were both obsessed with deviant sex,’ she said. ‘The difference is that Crowley was an intellectual who had consciously made himself into what he was – embracing the dark. Whereas West, like Lynsey, was a natural. A man with absolutely no moral sense. A man who didn’t even recognize what was taboo. As long as… he got off on it, it was all right.’

‘Didn’t philosophize about it, just did it,’ Bliss added. ‘And it was West, we have to assume, who enabled Lynsey to, to—’

‘Free her dark side,’ Merrily said.

‘Exactly. Filthy mind, filthy hands, perverse and insatiable,’ said Bliss. ‘And here he was again, ten years on, working on his own in this magical place, obviously with the keys to the premises. And now here’s Lynsey in there with him. Don’t tell me you didn’t know about that, Piers.’

‘I swear…’ Connor-Crewe was pale now, but it might simply ‘have been outrage. ‘I swear to God I did not know that man had even been in Underhowle. And I did not know about him and Lynsey.’

‘What sort of people came to your parties, Piers?’

‘Certainly nobody like him.’

‘So you don’t know what went on in the chapel while it was being converted into a bottling plant?’

‘As I’ve already stated.’

‘When the water venture failed, the chapel was sold to Roddy Lodge. And then Lynsey started “going out” with Roddy, while still giving her address as the home of Paul Connell, father of two of her children. And while maintaining a friendship with you, and even working here sometimes.’

‘She was easily bored. Enjoyed variety.’

‘Why do you think she became interested in Roddy Lodge?’

‘Presumably because he was quite well off. How should I know? She’d often latch on to men.’

‘Oh, Piers, please. She was initially interested in Lodge because he was the new owner of the chapel which was now more important than ever to her – after whatever she and Fred did there.’

‘All right,’ Connor-Crewe said, as if suddenly weary. ‘She did ask me if I knew Lodge and whether he had anything in mind for the building. I understood he’d simply bought it as part of the deal for the old garage.’

Bliss was silent, thinking.

Merrily said, ‘Whose idea was it to buy the chapel from Lodge and turn it into a museum?’

‘We… we all thought it was a good idea, but I imagine it was Cody who said why don’t we buy it? Both he and Lodge were enjoying their wealth, the ability to buy and sell. And as Cody’s solicitor was now representing the Development Committee, it made it—’

Bliss looked up. ‘Mr Nye?’

‘It simplified things,’ Connor-Crewe said.

‘Something here stinks like the inside of an Efflapure,’ Bliss said. ‘But we’ll let that go for the present. What were Roddy and Lynsey doing in the chapel?’

‘I wouldn’t know that. I never went in there. I did ask Lodge’s permission once to do some minor excavation of the area immediately around the chapel. This was after I’d made some small finds – coins and things – in nearby fields.’

‘And was Roddy accommodating?’

‘He even lent me his small digger to put in a couple of trenches.’

‘Did you find anything?’

‘I found the statue of Diana, as we like to call it. Eight inches long, headless, not terribly well preserved, but what it tells us about the site is significant.’

‘Right.’ Abruptly, Bliss stood up. ‘Thank you very much, sir – for the moment.’

Merrily could almost feel the heat coming off Bliss as he stood on the edge of the raised area around the Market House in the heart of Ross, with traffic edging past down the hill and the rain starting. He was stabbing at his mobile as if it was a detonator.

‘Frannie,’ she said, ‘why don’t you just tell Fleming? If you’re right, he’ll see it as a selfless gesture from someone he thought wasn’t capable of one. But if you’re wrong, and he finds out…’

He stared at her like she’d suggested that he throw himself under a truck. He put the phone to his ear and waited for nearly half a minute before snapping it shut in irritation.

‘Yeh, yeh, I’m dog meat. I’m already dog meat. Now, where’s Gomer, Merrily? Where can I try? Does he have a mobile?’

Merrily sighed. ‘He could be on his way to Underhowle. As the local gravedigger was refusing to dig one for Lodge, I thought I’d better make provision. He’s meeting Huw over there about… now-ish.’

The tip of Bliss’s tongue crept to a corner of his mouth.

‘You little beauty, Merrily.’

‘So what happened with Kirsty?’

‘First things first,’ Bliss said coldly.

44 Void

‘NOW WE’RE MOVING,’ Frannie Bliss said.

In fact, Gomer was the only one of them moving – walking slowly, head down, across the acre of land that ran parallel to the paddock behind Roddy Lodge’s bungalow. Like he was dowsing, but without the divining rod: plant-hire instinct.

Merrily and Bliss were standing up against a rotting five-bar gate, snatching lunch from a bag of vegetable pasties she’d bought from a health-food shop in Ross. The rain had stopped, but the wind was rising. The sky was sepia and flecked with shrivelled leaves. It was 1.25 p.m. The stone chapel stood in front of them, like a beached hulk, against the light.

In front of the chapel stood Gomer’s truck with the mini-JCB on the back. Piers Connor-Crewe had grudgingly given them permission to excavate here – no real choice, with Bliss in this mood – yet had elected not to join them.

‘Which I find very odd,’ Merrily said when Bliss mentioned it in passing.

‘Smug public-school twat.’ Bliss finished his pasty in a small, triumphant cloud of crumbs. ‘Probably gone to alert Mr Nye.’

‘Think about it,’ Merrily said. ‘If you were any kind of serious student of archaeology and the police were coming to dig up your prime site, if you couldn’t stop it you’d at least want to watch, wouldn’t you? So you could jump in the trench and check out anything that looked interesting in the way of archaeology, prevent anything being despoiled. Wouldn’t you?’

Bliss watched Gomer bending down, patting the grass. ‘So?’

‘So why isn’t he here? Did you hear him once asking you to be very careful with that digger?’

‘Maybe he assumes he’s exhausted the site.’

‘Well, yeah, that’s one possibility.’ She looked over at the back fences of the houses in Goodrich Close, about two hundred yards away, the village sloping up behind them to the parish church, which was actually only a couple of fields away. ‘The other is that he couldn’t care less because there never was a site.’

‘Not quite following you,’ Bliss said.

‘I think Merrily’s implying an element of fabrication, lad.’

Huw Owen drank spring water from a small plastic bottle. He hadn’t eaten. Merrily felt guilty about this, although Huw had insisted she should eat.

‘The site of Ariconium was always said to be at Weston- under-Penyard, right?’ She pointed down the valley. ‘I mean, they haven’t found all that much there, either, but that was where the evidence always pointed. Now, when I was talking to Sam Hall this morning, he said Piers was not popular in Weston. Which Piers would always laugh about – saying Weston was a pretty place that had never deserved Ariconium anyway. Underhowle, however…’

‘He faked it?’ Bliss stood away from the gate. ‘How would that be possible? What about all the bits of pottery, the statue, the—?’

‘Bits of Roman pottery and mosaic are not that hard to come by. Lots of them about, and not too expensive. Piers does antiquarian books and he’s surrounded by antique dealers. Not too much of a problem to pick up a few odds and ends, then either pretend to have found them or bury them for someone else to find. Not much of a problem convincing people, either, when everybody local wants to believe.’

‘Had me going,’ Huw admitted. ‘I were quite ready to believe the chapel’s on the site of a Roman temple, complete with spring. And of course it might be.’

‘Exactly,’ Merrily said. ‘It might be. Even if they had an archaeological dig there that found nothing, that still wouldn’t disprove it.’

‘Let me get this right,’ Bliss said. ‘You’re suggesting the whole Ariconium thing’s a scam, to give Underhowle historic status? The Roman town never was underneath here?’

‘I think Sam Hall suspects it. Ingrid Sollars, too, obviously, and she knows about local history. But if we’re only talking a couple of miles, and if it isn’t harming anyone, and it helps put Underhowle back on the tourist map…’

‘All down to Connor-Crewe?’

‘One of his academic jokes. A few finds, a lot of informed conjecture. And they’ll have their visitor centre with audiovisuals and maps and computer-generated mock-ups put together by real experts at Cody’s. All very state-of-the-art. Are they even breaking any laws?’

‘Not if you ignore obtaining large sums of money, in the form of substantial grants, by deception,’ Bliss said. ‘Might have some difficulty proving it. But, when all this is over, we can try really, really hard.’

‘I could be totally wrong.’

‘The fact that it’s even occurred to you – a little priest who tries to think well of us all – might suggest otherwise.’ Bliss looked across at the village, scattered down the hill like the crumbs on his shirt. ‘These obscure little places do attract them, don’t they? Connor-Crewe a liar, Cody with form…’

Merrily blinked. ‘Form?’

‘It’s not exactly in his brochures – and I didn’t, of course, tell you this – but he did a little time. Detention centre, as a teenager. Street crime in London. Car theft, mainly, finally earning him nine months in a grown-up prison.’

‘Bloody hell,’ Merrily said.

‘Which, of course, was where he learned about computers. Discovered a wondrous natural aptitude. Came out directly into software, making more out of it than crime ever paid. And then, when he got into the hardware too, it was probably expedient to move to somewhere he wasn’t known. He’d got relatives in the Forest, and so… Yeh, Andy Mumford, it was, stumbled on that one. One day, if he gets really big, it’ll be part of the Cody legend. But not yet.’

‘Ah, well…’ Huw’s smile was sour. ‘For every sinner who repents and becomes a millionaire…’

‘The morality’s skewed,’ Merrily said, ‘but it’s a flawed world. Look at what Cody’s done for Underhowle in terms of jobs and morale and education.’

Huw nodded at the hillside, where the mobile-phone transmitter poked out of its clearing. ‘And health.’

‘A very flawed world,’ Merrily acknowledged sadly.

Huw turned his face into the rising wind and gazed down the valley, where the Roman road had led from Ariconium to Glevum, the city of light, the way marked now by electricity pylons. And spirits, Merrily thought uneasily. She could almost see the cracks opening in the façade of Underhowle, in the soil and the tarmac, like ruptured graves on Judgement Day.

Gomer came over. ‘Right then, folks. Three places I can see there’s been a bit o’ digging. Nothing recent, mind.’

‘How not recent?’ Bliss asked.

‘Not since summer. Can’t say n’more’n that. So… I got two hours for you, boy.’ He turned to Merrily. ‘That all right with you, vicar? I been up the churchyard with Mr Owen yere. Lodge plot’s out on the edge where it joins the field and the ground’s soft. Reckon I can do the grave by hand – less noise, ennit?’

‘If you’re sure.’

‘He’s sure,’ Bliss confirmed. ‘Right.’ He dug into a pocket of his hiking jacket and presented Merrily with his mobile. ‘If you wouldn’t mind holding on to that for me. I’ve asked Mumford to try and get me some more background on Lynsey Davies, since she’s now centre-stage, so to speak. So if he calls I’ll take it. If it’s any bastard from headquarters, you don’t even know where I am.’ He clapped Gomer on the back. ‘Let’s do it, son. We’re looking for a body, female. Maybe more than one.’

‘And what are you looking for, Huw?’ Merrily screwed up the bag that had held the pasties and stuck it in her pocket. She wished all this was over: the digging, the exposure, the secret funeral.

‘Looking for an end, lass.’

She realized she didn’t want to know what he meant.

Frannie Bliss was helping Gomer bring down the mini- digger, a grown-up yellow Tonka Toy with caterpillar tracks. Here was Gomer starting to work again, resilient, his demons dealt with – not entirely satisfactorily, but no longer burning inside his head. But Frannie was like a failing footballer at the start of a winter game: jumpy, rubbing his hands. Dangerous.

Merrily said, ‘What happens now?’

‘All down to you.’ Huw looked her in the eyes – an old wolfhound, trusting.

Deceptively trusting. She was fairly sure now that Huw must have had a hand in setting her up for the Lodge funeral. A quiet call to the Bishop, a favour called in. Huw, by virtue of what he did – a responsibility that few would shoulder – could quietly pull ropes that made bells ring in cathedrals. Huw had unfinished business, and he was looking for a way in, and she was it: the female Deliverance minister, the vulnerable one who relied on guidance.

‘Family wants a small funeral,’ Huw said. ‘Quickie. No hymns, no eulogies. Everybody’d like that. You could give ’em their quickie and walk away. Let Underhowle get on with its bright, clean future full of new jobs and computer literacy.’

‘I could do that. What should I do?’

‘Modern world, lass,’ he went on, as though he hadn’t heard her. ‘And not even your parish. It’s Jerome’s – good old turn-a- blind-eye-for-tomorrow-we-retire-to-the-seaside Jerome. You’re just the hired help, the dishrag.’

‘Yes. Thanks. Now, what do you think I should do?’

‘I’d think about the full requiem.’

She stared at him. ‘A requiem eucharist… for Roddy Lodge?

Are you serious?’ This was not the Roman Catholic Church, not High Anglican. ‘We don’t do requiems in this area, except even for the seriously devout, and…’

Huw regarded her solemnly. The yellow digger trundled slowly past, Gomer in the saddle, Bliss walking in front like he had Gomer on a rein.

‘… The unquiet dead,’ Merrily said. ‘Ah, yes.’

‘The insomniacs,’ Huw agreed.

‘Huw, this is an actual funeral. At night.’

‘Exactly,’ Huw said. ‘Things need to be laid to rest. Anyroad, if these lads find a body, the whole place’ll be alight by then.’

‘I don’t know.’ In Deliverance, a requiem eucharist was employed to unite a disturbed, earthbound spirit with God. ‘Who are we talking about? Roddy… Lynsey? Or… ?’

‘Or the whole village, if you like. And the evil that’s come into it.’

‘For most people,’ Merrily said, ‘nothing’s come into this village but progress. Therefore, good.’

‘And what do you think?’

‘I don’t know.’ She gripped the top bar of the gate with both hands. It was greasy with lichen. ‘You’re like Sam and his death road. You’re following a black trail all the way from Gloucester, and I don’t know how valid that is. I don’t know if it exists. You always told us to question everything – question, question, question. So now I’m questioning you. Like, how objective is this?’

In her coat pocket, a phone began to buzz. She pulled out two: her own and Frannie’s.

Hers.

‘Mrs Watkins?’ Female, young-sounding. ‘My name’s Libby Porterhouse, from the Mail on Sunday. I know you’re rather busy at the moment, but I wonder if we could have a chat.’

Not what she needed, but if there was one thing you learned about dealing with the press it was never to say no comment. Express interest, surprise, ask some questions of your own, but never let them think you had any reason to be unhelpful.

‘Well, I’ll tell you what I can,’ Merrily said, ‘but I’m not sure I’m the best person. I’m just the hired help on this one.’

‘Ah, we may be talking at cross purposes,’ Libby Porterhouse said. ‘I know you’re involved with this serial killer funeral row in the Wye Valley, but this is something entirely different. I’m with Features, and I’m doing quite an extensive piece on Jenny Driscoll.’

‘What about her?’

‘I understand she’s a friend of yours.’

‘We live in the same village.’

‘And that she’s given you a large sum of money. I’d like to ask you about that and a few other things, get your side of the story.’

‘Story?’

‘How long have you known Jenny Driscoll?’

Merrily said, ‘It’s just that I’m standing in a muddy field, with some people…’

‘Well, if you tell me when it’s best to call you back. I really don’t want to keep hassling you, and I truly think, when you know about this, that it’s something you’ll want to comment on. For your own sake.’

Oh God. ‘Can we leave it till tomorrow? If you’re not carrying the piece until Sunday…’

‘What about tonight?’

‘OK, I’ll see what I can do,’ Merrily said.

Remembering the note from Jane but not Jenny Box’s number, Merrily rang Directory Inquiries and asked for Box, Ledwardine. It turned out, as expected, to be ex-directory. Damn. Nothing else she could do from here.

‘Problem?’ Huw said.

‘Parochial.’ She rang Uncle Ted’s number. What the hell kind of story had the Mail got? She remembered James Bull- Davies: Woman’s got a bit of a crush on you, after all. Pretty common knowledge.

No answer at Ted’s. She shut down the phone and stood staring across the scrubby field to where Gomer was shovelling out his first shallow trench, Bliss walking alongside now, peering down. The chapel, behind them, was black and formless.

Ring the brother, eh?’ Huw said close to her ear. ‘Tell him you think a requiem would be best for all concerned and, as nobody’s going to know, time’s no longer of the essence.’

‘Huw,’ she said, ‘did you set me up for this funeral?’

‘Banks genuinely didn’t want to do it.’

‘I realize that.’

‘Merrily,’ Huw said, ‘you’ve not been at it long but, of all of them, you’re the one I trust most. You don’t make assumptions and you never just go through the motions. And you’re never too sure of yourself, never afraid to say when you don’t understand.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Merrily said.

Huw looked away. ‘I’ve said enough. Don’t want to influence you.’

‘I’m already influenced. I think you and Frannie are letting personal issues block your objectivity. Personal grief, in your case.’

‘Sometimes you have to follow your heart.’

‘You never said that before. That’s the opposite to what you told us on the course.’ She stood in front of him, her back to the digger. ‘You never said that before!’

‘Happen I never knew it.’

‘Christ, Huw…’ Her shoes were sinking into the mud. ‘You cannot exorcize him! Even if you think he’s here. Even if you think he’s in that chapel, you cannot do it. Because, no matter what kind of pond life he was, he was of this earth.’

‘What if there were summat else?’

‘There was nothing else.’ She thought of the missing builders’ tools, the callused hands around Zoe Franklin’s neck, the walking definition of the term earthbound, the lamp of the wicked and the hunger of the dead. ‘It was soiled lust of the worst kind – a depraved appetite that could only be sated, in the end, by causing extreme, mortal fear.’

‘And what happens when the body’s gone and only the appetite remains in a black void? What is that? And what happens when there are human beings out here, amongst us, who ‘actually aspire to the black void? People who are, by whatever means, prepared – eager – to call it into themselves?’

Merrily closed her eyes. She felt the cold mass of the old Baptist chapel very close behind her, almost as if she was carrying it on her back. She could hear the digger coming towards her, and then the shuffling, metallic scraping of the blade in the earth.

‘At least do the requiem,’ Huw said.

She nodded and brought out her phone.

45 Execution

THERE WAS A low rumbling: the wind on ill-fitting leaded windows.

‘In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.’

No need to raise the voice above normal, not for a congregation of nine, including the two undertakers and the corpse.

Under lights that were dusty orbs, yellow going on brown, Merrily walked over to Roddy Lodge’s coffin.

‘I’m convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rules, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord.’

It had been well after dusk when a white van had been driven to the church door. George Lomas, cheerfully overweight, with rimless glasses, and his son, Stephen, stocky and hedgehog- haired, had slipped Roddy inside like contraband.

Only ninety minutes later than planned.

No disrespect, but it seemed like the best way, Mr Lomas had whispered to Merrily, shaking hands in the porch. I panicked a bit after that demo last night. Didn’t want no scratches on the hearse, so I phoned the Lodges, suggested we put the whole thing back until everybody’s home from work, watching telly. Didn’t nobody tell you?

‘I’m afraid not,’ Merrily had said coldly to Mr Lomas, whose bill might reasonably be expected to reflect the unorthodox hours.

Lol’s concert! She could have wept.

From the glass wall beside the stairs you could see most of the city glowing just below you, and you wanted to walk out into it, like some glistening sea.

‘Maybe I’ll go out for some air,’ Lol said.

Prof leaped up and put his back against the door of the Green Room. ‘You’ll stay where you are, you paranoid bastard!’

‘It’s OK,’ Lol said. ‘Loads of time.’ He wasn’t due to go on until halfway through the gig. And then only if it feels right, Moira had said.

As if it ever could.

The Courtyard, all glass and Lego, was set at right angles to the road, in the city’s recreational quarter, opposite Hereford United’s Edgar Street ground. Lol had driven himself there in the Astra, Prof driving tight behind him the whole way to make sure he didn’t take a detour via Birmingham, Manchester, Cardiff…

When he’d driven into the car park, the lights in the glass front were scary, making it seem very public, like a bus station. Within a couple of hours he was supposed to be standing alone on a stage inside that glass palace with the lights burning down on him, only a guitar to protect him and a crowd four times the size of the one which had watched Roddy Lodge die. Screaming encouragement: Why’n’t you jump?

Moira had the dressing room immediately behind the stage and Lol was changing here in the Green Room, with a washbasin and a kettle, the Washburn guitar, the Boswell guitar and Prof Levin hopping about like a surrogate nervous system.

‘Why you got to keep messing with that mobile? Just switch it off. If he calls now, you’ll have to say you’ll get back to him in the morning.’

Lol had left two messages for Mephisto Jones. Maybe Mephisto was sick, struck down with an electric migraine. Then, half an hour ago, Merrily had rung, upset, close to tears. She wasn’t going to make it in time. Probably wasn’t going to make it at all. He was almost relieved, and he told her that, and she said, If you run away, now… don’t you dare run away…

He’d gone down to the booking office to leave a message there: when a Jane Watkins arrived to pick up her ticket, tell her to wait for Lol Robinson afterwards. Then he’d changed into black jeans and a fresh alien sweatshirt with no holes in it, remembering how King Charles I had worn an extra shirt for his execution so that at least he wouldn’t be trembling with the cold. Sitting on a stool in the Green Room, Lol had a terrible feeling now: ominous.

‘What’s wrong?’

Moira had drifted in, the beautiful folk-rock goddess in her long dress of midnight blue, low-cut. A silver pendant was trickling like water between her breasts, as though it was part of the same stream that began in her long dark hair.

‘Talk him through this, Moira,’ Prof said. ‘I have to go check things in the booth.’

Lol smiled uncertainly at Moira. ‘So you’ll do half a dozen songs ending with “Tower”, and then I kind of creep on and we do “Baker’s Lament”.’

‘Then you play for as long as you feel happy about, and I’ll come back as and when. Piece of cake, Laurence.’

‘Piece of cake,’ he said and felt that flicker of separation, putting him minutely out of synch, and for a moment he was watching himself looking at the beautiful woman in midnight blue and silver, knowing now for certain that it wasn’t going to happen for him, that this was her concert and hers alone and nothing else was going to happen.

‘Oh, it will happen,’ Moira said, and he didn’t even wonder how she’d plucked that thought from his mind, because he might actually have said it while he was out of synch. Anything could have happened; his head was full of storm clouds.

A possibly important thought came to him, then wafted past like a pale moth, and he put his head in his hands for a moment to try and catch it. But it had gone, and he heard Moira saying, ‘Who the hell are you?’

Cola French was standing in the doorway, the golden stars in her hair and a small black hat with a feather.

‘How’d you get in?’ Moira growled.

‘Friends,’ Cola said. ‘And lies. I tell a lot of lies.’ She looked past Moira at Lol. ‘I lied before, Lol – I lied when I said I wasn’t involved.’

Lol was on his feet. Then his phone buzzed.

‘Lynsey and Piers and Roddy and the whole bit,’ Cola said. ‘But when I heard the copper with Piers, and your… lady, this morning at the shop, I’m thinking, I can’t sit on this shit any more.’

‘Aye, well, you can sit on it a wee bit longer, hen,’ Moira said. And as Lol watched her shepherding Cola French into the passage, he heard in the phone, ‘It’s Jones here. That Lol Robinson?’

Another voice, one of the Courtyard staff, said, ‘Ten minutes, Moira.’

‘We meet in the name of Jesus Christ, who died and was raised to the glory of God the Father. Grace and mercy be with you.’

There was a muffled gonging from one of the cooling radiators. Under those opaque glass globes, it looked as cold inside here as it was starting to feel.

No warmth for those who would mourn a murderer.

It was a boxy place, the Church of St Peter, Underhowle, so regular and heavy with dark wood that it might have been a Victorian magistrates’ court. A Jerome Banks kind of church. Merrily, wearing her monastic white alb, was not comfortable here.

‘We… we’ve come here to remember before God our brother Roddy, to commend him to God, our merciful redeemer and our… judge. To commit his body to be buried. And to comfort one another.’

There were two rows of pews – to her right the Lodges, on the left Ingrid Sollars and Sam Hall. Ingrid wore a brown shawl over her ravaged wax jacket. Sam’s silver ponytail was tied with a thin, black ribbon.

The light-pine coffin rested on a bier like a hostess trolley. Lomas and son sat two rows down, behind the Lodges, inflating the congregation by twenty-five per cent.

‘Almighty God, you judge us with infinite mercy and justice… and love everything you have made. In your mercy, turn the darkness of death into the dawn of new life…’

Alone at the bottom of the nave, hunched like a night- watchman, was Huw. He’d phoned Banks himself, to arrange for the sacrament. Merrily didn’t trust him. The word AGENDA hung in the air above him, in mystic neon.

‘… And the sorrow of parting into the joy of heaven; through our saviour, Jesus Christ.’

Meanwhile, Gomer was out there, working by hurricane lamp at the bottom of the churchyard. Tony Lodge had shown them the spot, to the left of his parents’ grave, about ten feet from the boundary hedge, a line of laurels screening it from the rest of the churchyard. Seeing the spot had made Merrily wonder why anyone had thought it worth objecting; this would be a grave you’d need a map to find.

It was fortunate, in a way, that the funeral had been delayed because Gomer had also made a late start.

This was due to his stoical digging around the Baptist chapel uncovering nothing but stones.

At four-thirty, Frannie Bliss, pale and sweating, had still been refusing to give up, raging against the dying of the light, Try here… Try back there. It’s gorra be here, or it all falls down. And then, in agony, Don’t let me down, Gomer! Until Gomer, exasperated, had snatched out his ciggy: I’m tellin’ you, boy, you blew it. There en’t nothin’ buried yere but clay.

At 4.55, Fleming’s secretary had rung, wondering where Bliss was. Merrily saying, Isn’t he there already? I hope he’s not had an accident, like she was Mrs Bliss, poor woman. By then Frannie – so convinced earlier that he’d be making the triumphant call that would bring Fleming and his team down here, with a small army of SOCOs and the Home Office pathologist – had been close to tears. He’d said he might come up the church later; Merrily hoped he wouldn’t. Rage and despair were not helpful at a funeral.

The reflection of the cold globe above it wobbled now in the steel plate on the coffin. Merrily imagined Roddy Lodge lying there in the merciful darkness, sealed away from a hostile world of electric lights, televisions, mobile phones, radiation.

The schedule for Common Worship suggested this was the most suitable time for the first hymn. Hymns were useful; they gave you a break, time to gather your thoughts for the next stage, which was your ‘tribute’ to the deceased.

For which she wasn’t ready. There were some things still to work out. It was important to at least approach the truth.

But there would be no hymns tonight. There was no organist. She imagined seven strained voices raised in stilted intimacy under the dismal hanging lamps.

No hymns.

She was grateful, at first, when the side door opened and Gomer slipped in. He didn’t come any further, just stood by the entrance, still carrying his hurricane lamp, and when she raised a questioning eyebrow at him, wild, white light flared in his glasses: warning, warning, warning.

‘Would you… excuse me… one moment.’ Merrily moved down past the coffin and followed Gomer into the porch, closing the doors against the wind. Gomer coughed.

‘This yere grave, vicar. Problem with him. En’t entirely vacant.’

‘Oh.’ This sometimes happened. A graveyard was crowded underground; there was slippage. It would happen tonight. ‘How far down is the other coffin?’

Gomer said. ‘That’s the point, ennit? This one don’t have no coffin.’

‘Put it out of your head, all right?’ Moira picked up the Boswell guitar by its neck and handed it to Lol. ‘I told the girl you’d talk to her afterwards. She’ll find you. Now let’s get this stuff on stage.’

Mephisto Jones had said he’d been out all day helping a friend to do some fencing on his farm. Then he’d called in for a beer on his way home. He said he was feeling good at the moment; on nights like this, feeling stronger, he wondered if it wasn’t time to come back to England, give it another try. Yeah, he remembered Prof, of course he remembered Prof.

Lol had made himself sit down and ask some questions about the symptoms of electrical hypersensitivity, telling Mephisto about Roddy Lodge’s death on the pylon. At one point, Prof had looked in, his bald head shining with sweat, shaking both fists.

He’d be well out of it, Mephisto had said. Wouldn’t know who he was any more.

He said he was Satan,’Lol had recalled.

Makes sense, Mephisto had said. I used to think I was the walking dead, but you know what they said about Satan…

Now Lol and Moira carried the guitars down the passage, under muted lights, and out onto the stage, where black curtains concealed the auditorium. Sounds of mass movement out there. This wasn’t a big theatre, but it still felt like standing on a cliff- top overhanging a vast city.

They put the guitars on stands: the curved-backed Boswell, the Washburn and Moira’s thin-backed Martin. There were voice microphones and guitar mikes at waist level.

‘Check the tuning,’ Moira instructed, and Lol went through the motions while she fingered a couple of chords on the Martin, provoking a whoop from beyond the curtain. She put the guitar down, placed both hands on his shoulders, gripping hard, and hissed, ‘She’s no gonnae go away. She’ll find you. But you have to do this first, OK?’

A young guy in a black sweater appeared. ‘Whenever you’re ready.’

‘Thanks.’ Moira nodded. Rustling, chatter, laughter from behind the curtains. An audience. Hundreds of people anticipating an experience. ‘Will your wee priest have made it?’

He shook his head. ‘She’s been delayed.’

I lied when I said I wasn’t involved… Lynsey and Piers and Roddy and the whole bit. What were the implications here? What could he do about it tonight? Moira would play for maybe forty-five minutes, then he’d shamble on, do his forgettable best, shuffle off. An hour lost, maybe more.

On the other hand, if he were to shuffle off now…? It wasn’t as if he’d be letting Moira down – probably the reverse; appearing with sub-standard support didn’t help anyone’s reputation. And he certainly wouldn’t be letting the audience down. But how easy would it be to find Cola French and then get out of the theatre?

They came to the black curtains at the back of the stage. The main curtains had opened now, and he could see the audience in the steep theatre, could see that it was almost full, that all the boxes set into the walls on either side seemed to have been taken.

The house lights went down. The chat sank as sweetly as the ambient noise being lowered in the mix of a live recording. The mike stands and the guitars stood in pools of golden light, and you could almost hear the steel strings vibrating in the air.

Silence like a gasp. Four hundred people out there. Anticipation.

Then Moira said, ‘OK, off you go.’

He spun in shock, and she stepped behind him to cut off his retreat, and the curtains either side of her were execution black.

‘I thought, with you needing to get away, you could go on first after all,’ Moira said.

Lol’s lungs made like a vacuum pump.

Moira pushed him hard. ‘Just get the fuck out there, eh, Robinson?’

46 Mephisto’s Blues

GOMER HAD LEFT an earthen step inside the grave, and he went down onto it, but he held the hurricane lamp away so that Merrily couldn’t see.

‘En’t terrible attractive, vicar,’ Gomer admitted.

‘Doesn’t matter.’ She stood on the slippery rim of the grave and leaned over, the wind pulling at the hood of her alb and rattling the laurel bushes. The church crouched above them with its stubby bell-tower, and the lights from inside were dull and unhelpful.

The smell was mainly of freshly turned earth and clay, but it was still the smell of mortality. Her foot dislodged a cob of soil, and she stumbled.

‘Careful, vicar.’

‘I’m OK. Go on… let’s have a look.’

She drew a breath. Gomer flattened himself against the side of the grave and lifted the lamp so that it lit up the interior of the grave like an intimate cellar.

‘Deep,’ Gomer said. ‘Cold earth – preserves ’em better, see.’

Merrily looked down into an absence of eyes. Decay was a corrosive face pack. In its nest of clay-caked hair, the face was like a child’s crude cardboard mask, the emptiness of it all emphasized by the mouth, the way the jaw had fallen open on one side into a last crooked plea.

And all of it made heartbreaking by the rags of what looked like a red sweatshirt and an uncovered hand with its dull glimmer of rings. She had to be fully six feet down. Some gravediggers today didn’t go that deep. She could have ended up with a coffin on top and never have been found.

Merrily stepped back, making the sign of the cross.

‘There was this.’ Gomer climbed out. He held up the lamp and opened out his other hand. ‘Cleaned him up a bit, vicar, so’s you can see.’

She saw an angel.

An angel on a chain.

‘If he was still round the neck, see, I’d’ve left him on, but he was lying on top, he was. Loose. Like somebody’d put him in after the body.’

The angel was no more than an inch and a half long, with wings spread and hands crossed over its lower abdomen, which protruded as though it was pregnant. In fact, there was something curved there, like a small locket or a cameo.

‘Any idea what he is, vicar?’

She felt a sadness as sharp as pain. ‘Think I just might.’

‘Valuable?’

‘It was to someone,’ Merrily said.

Lol felt like he was dying, his recent past laid out before him in a mosaic of faces.

He stood there, frozen, gazing into purgatory, a warm-col- oured vault with boxes set into the sides like the balconies of apartment blocks or the doors in an advent calendar.

The house lights had come up again, because somebody thought he wasn’t ready – some technical problem, maybe – and now he could see the individual faces in the mosaic.

He saw, in one of the boxes, Al and Sally Boswell – Al in his Romany waistcoat and his diklo, Sally in that long white dress with the embroidery around the bosom, the dress that was so much a part of her personal history. The two of them sitting in their box, gypsy aristocracy, as if this was a ceremonial occasion for them. Al, who’d given Lol the Boswell guitar, had come to Hereford to see it abused.

The Boswell guitar was behind Lol, on its stand. He had the Washburn hanging from his shoulder; it felt unresponsive, like a shovel.

He saw Alison Kinnersley, this woman who’d originally gone with him to Ledwardine and then left him for the squire, James Bull-Davies, and his farm and his horses. Bad for you, Lucy Devenish had told him sternly. Wrong type of woman entirely.

James was there, too, in a tie. A male-menopausal stooge, said Lucy Devenish, who’s known only two kinds of women – garrison-town whores and county-set heifers.

Lol’s hands felt numb as he stared into the huge, cavernous silence and all the people stared back at him with a tremulous fascination – that apprehension-turning-to-anticipation which had been so palpably apparent when Roddy Lodge was high in the pylon, reaching out to the insulator, the killing candle.

Lol saw Jane, close to the front. Jane Watkins who one day, before he knew her mother, had come into the cluttered folklore emporium, Ledwardine Lore, when he was minding the shop for Lucy.

What the hell was his first song supposed to be? Oh God. The amplified silence boomed in his head. How long had he been standing here like this? How long before they started the slow handclap? How long before someone pulled the curtain? What was he supposed to do?

Directly opposite him was the glass-fronted control booth where Prof Levin sat. Prof was standing up, very still, his hands theatrically over his eyes, like this was some Greek tragedy.

Then Lol saw Eirion, on the far left, probably the only person in that audience not staring back at him, because he was looking at Jane, who was looking at Lol, hands clasped, face taut with anxiety. Suddenly all she sees is darkness, doom, nothing… nothing amazing out there any more.

There was an unexpected prickling in the corners of Lol’s eyes. He hadn’t mentioned the gig to the Boswells, wouldn’t have dared – it must have been Prof. But who had told Alison and Bull-Davies? And surely that was… who could possibly have told Sophie Hill… who was sitting with a man who must be her husband, very near the back, presumably in case the sound level proved insufferable.

‘Hey, man, where you been?’ A lone male voice curling out of the third row.

Nervous laughter from somewhere. The sweat in Lol’s hands felt like cold honey.

He whispered into the mike, ‘Away.’

The whisper was as crisp as an iceberg lettuce, and huge; how sound systems had improved.

‘When you reckon you’ll be back, then?’ the guy in the third row said.

‘Well, I don’t really know,’ Lol said. ‘It depends on…’

… remembering what the first song is.

And then suddenly he did, his fingers finding the riff. Into the mike, he said,

Tuesdays on Victoria ward We always hated Tuesdays.

And he must have sung it, kind of, because the lights went down and some applause bubbled up.

The last face Lol saw before the whole audience went into deep shadow was Jane’s. She was slumping in her seat with her head thrown back, and he could almost hear the whoosh of breath coming out of her, as he did the number.

Did the number!

Leaning on the guitar, now, as he went into the chorus.

Someone’s got to pay

Now Dr Gascoigne’s on his way

And it’s another…

HEAVY MEDICATION DAY.

Wondering, for the first time, whether it might have been wiser to change Dr Gascoigne’s name.

Nah. Stuff you, Dr Gascoigne, you cold-eyed sadist.

Lol discovered he was smiling. The people out there, the unknown faces, must have thought it was part of his act, faking disorientation. Only a real professional could do that and get away with it. Lol felt he was floating, and when the song was over, someone at the back started shouting, ‘ “Sunny Days”!’ and there were ragged handclaps in support.

Well, he wasn’t going to do that trite crap, not in a million years.

Definitely not.

When he reached the chorus, he was staggered at the number of people singing along.

And it’s always on the sunny days you feel you can’t go on On rainy days it rains on everyone But I’m running for the subway and I’m hiding under trees On fine days like…

‘Yes.’ Sam Hall held the angel under the brass-shaded pulpit light. ‘It’s what’s known as a bio-electric shield pendant.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ Merrily said. ‘Jane – my kid – was looking for one. I just couldn’t remember what it was called.’

The two of them were up in the pulpit, voices lowered. The service had been suspended. What else could she do? There was no way this coffin was going in that grave. A grave that, before the night was out, would be surrounded by what Bliss called the Durex suits.

‘In here’ – Sam put a finger on the cameo part that had made the angel look pregnant – ‘we have a bunch of crystals – quartz, maybe some malachite – that are supposed to interact with the body’s own energy field to deflect electromagnetic radiation. Often worn by people who work with computers.’

‘And… have you seen one before? In Underhowle?’

‘Yep.’

So, when you said Melanie Pullman was getting nothing but Valium from Dr Ruck, and you suggested she should consult an alternative practitioner in Hereford about her EH, was this… ?’

‘This was one of the items they got for Mel. Told her to wear it day and night. For a short while, she was a familiar figure in the village, with the angel around her neck. In fact, you can ask Bliss about this, but I think, when she went missing, the description the police put out suggested that she might well be wearing it.’ Sam gave the angel back to Merrily. ‘Where did this come from, Reverend?’

‘Excuse me, Mrs Watkins.’ Down in the nave, Mr Lomas was tentatively on his feet. ‘I don’t like to interrupt, look…’

Merrily flashed a warning glance at Sam, and went down to talk to the undertaker. Taking Mr Lomas over to the door where Gomer was waiting, telling him there’d been an unforeseen problem with the grave, that it wasn’t empty. Mr Lomas nodded, not entirely surprised; he’d been here before.

‘What do you want to do, then, Mrs Watkins? I don’t suppose it’s a problem easily dealt with until tomorrow. Which might cause another problem here.’ Mr Lomas nodded at the coffin. ‘You want us to take him back? Or you could lock him in here for the night, and we’ll be back tomorrow.’

Tony Lodge came over. He’d overheard. ‘Can’t be nobody else in that plot, Reverend, it was a field twenty years ago. Our field. That’s how we got the family plot extended – we gave the field to the Church.’

‘Sloping graveyard, ennit?’ Gomer said knowledgeably. He’d replaced half the soil over the remains, for concealment. ‘Slippage, see. Likely there was coffins under that field when you was still ploughing him.’

‘God, God, God.’ Cherry Lodge was out of her pew. ‘Is this bloody nightmare never going to end?’

‘Don’t you worry, Mrs Lodge,’ George Lomas said. ‘We’ll get this sorted in the morning, no problem. We’ll sort out another plot, but you can’t do that by torchlight.’ He looked at Merrily. ‘Leave him here, then, is it?’

Merrily looked at Tony Lodge, who looked non-committal. ‘I suppose so. Yeah… OK. Thank you, Mr Lomas.’

And so the Lomases left. And then there were seven, with Gomer. Seven and a corpse. Merrily looked at the four mourners, all of them on their feet, faces waxy under the sour- cream lights. ‘I don’t really know what to do now.’

She was aware of Huw Owen moving quietly up the aisle. Sam Hall said, ‘You can tell us about the body. That’d be a start.’

She nodded. ‘Well… it’s a woman, as you’ve gathered. And it isn’t in a coffin.’

‘Oh God almighty,’ Cherry Lodge said.

‘Roddy…’ Merrily hesitated. ‘Roddy dug graves for the church sometimes, didn’t he?’

‘They always had a regular gravedigger,’ Tony Lodge said, ‘but when the ground was difficult or they hit rocks, they’d call the boy in with his digger.’

Ingrid Sollars came over to inspect the bio-electric angel. She took it out of Merrily’s hands, held it tenderly in her own. ‘It is Melanie, then?’

Merrily nodded. ‘Looks like it, I’m afraid. Who are her nearest relatives?’

‘Her parents moved six months ago, into Ross. There’s an aunt over at Ryford. Was this still around her neck?’

‘It was lying on her chest. Whoever buried her evidently put it there. You can see the chain’s broken.’ Did it snap when she was being strangled?

‘Well, that’s the end of it, far as I’m concerned.’ Tony Lodge looked at the coffin with contempt, then down at his feet. ‘Let him be cremated. Empty his bloody ashes in the gutter.’

Huw Owen said quietly, ‘You can do what you like after the requiem. But finish it now, before you leave him in here for the night. Before the place is swarming wi’ coppers.’ He looked at Merrily. ‘Take it from me, lass, you mustn’t do half a job on this.’

Her heart sank. He was right. She turned to Gomer. ‘Do me one last favour? Frannie Bliss is probably down in one of the pubs. If you could give us, say, twenty minutes and then go and find him, put him in the picture, and…’

Make his night.

Gomer nodded, opened one of the double doors and stopped. There was a group of people packed into the porch. Seven or eight of them.

Merrily closed her eyes. Maybe they would go away.

‘This is so utterly contemptible,’ Fergus Young said. ‘Who would have thought the Church would lie and cheat and conspire?’

Lol didn’t know if it was any good, but he’d done it. As his eyes adjusted, he could again see Jane in the front row, and he was convinced at one point that she was crying – during the song he’d written about her mother when the longing was becoming acute.

Did you suffocate your feelings

As you redefined your goals

And vowed to undertake the cure of souls?

It was somewhere between this song and the next that he caught the mothlike thought that had glided past him in the Green Room, and he held it fluttering in his mind along with something Mephisto Jones had said: What happened, I was getting blackouts more frequently, and they’re not ordinary black-outs – you come round and you’re out of synch, don’t know where you are or what you’ve done.

It was like a song already: ‘Mephisto’s Blues’. The idea rocked him so hard that he muffed the tidy bit of Elizabethan finger- style at the end of ‘Cure’. A signal that it was time to go.

‘Thank you,’ Lol said, bemused. ‘I mean… you know… thanks for having me.’ He nodded to the audience, turned and left.

They were stamping furiously by the time he reached the wing of the stage. Stamping for Moira, probably.

Moira was hugging him. ‘Back.’

‘What?’

‘One more.’

‘I’ve got to go, Moira. I’m so grateful to you for this, but—’

‘Yeah, yeah, now get back out there. This is how it’s done – don’t you remember anything? And you forgot “Kivernoll”.’

He shook his head. His whole life had changed, but tonight that wasn’t very important. He had to find Cola French.

‘It’s organized,’ Moira said. ‘One more, then you can go.’

Something else hit him. ‘I need to collect Jane.’ Dismay. ‘She’s got no way of getting home.’

‘I’ll see to Jane, God help me.’

Moira turned him round and pushed him hard in the small of the back ‘Go!’

When Lol went back, it was like he’d won the war. He picked up the Boswell, of which he was unworthy. ‘Right,’ he told them. ‘Local-knowledge time.’ The Boswell eased her curvy back into his stomach. He did the unsurprising A-minor finger- style intro. Exorcizing Alison Kinnersley.

Under mountains of winter

Where the river of gold defines the valley

Something delicate splintered there…

He glanced over to where Alison sat with James Bull-Davies, but couldn’t make either of them out. This was a song that had come out of the Alison period, towards the end, when James was making his move. Lol and Alison had driven up to the Black Mountains on the Welsh border and there’d been an outburst and crying and, somehow, a reconciliation as they were motoring back down into the Golden Valley, and Lol had seen a name on a sign in a nowhere kind of place, with flat fields and a roadside barn-conversion in progress, and the place was called Kivernoll.

Approaching the chorus, he heard a rustling behind him, and Moira was there, a graceful ghost in midnight blue, and the response to this from the audience was like a wall of heat.

Kerry’s Gate the tears abated,

Cockyard found her smiling,

From Abbey Dore to Allensmore

By Kiverno—

And then Moira’s voice was lifting the line from under him: ‘—oh… oll.’ Dropping away, leaving Lol to sing, unaccompanied, ‘We were on a roll…’

He knew that she was introducing magic to an undistinguished little song and that this was approaching the best he would ever achieve, and when it was over, he just shouted into the mike, ‘Moira Cairns!’ and ducked out.

It was over this time, and Moira was mouthing Good luck and Lol was out of there, leaving the guitars on stage. Down the stairs and into the huge glassed area, all lit up. A bar to one side, a bunch of people in there. He needed to get into the auditorium, find—

‘Cannot wait for the album.’ Cola French had come up behind him. ‘Give me a lift home?’

She’d evidently been waiting for him; Moira had organized her. She followed him out into the blustery night to where the battered Astra was parked, the way he always left it, close to an entrance, vaguely pointing outwards.

‘This… is yours?’

‘It’s quite safe.’

‘Jesus.’

Lol was fitting his car key into the door when a man said, ‘Lol Robinson?’ The night blared white, three times. He was blinded. He stumbled against the car. ‘Sorry about that, mate,’ the man said. ‘Thanks a lot. All the best.’

Cola said, ‘Does this mean we’re an item?’

Lol stared after the photographer, fifty yards away by now, walking fast. He thought he could rule out the Hereford Times.

It couldn’t even be mistaken identity; the guy had known his name.

In

They got into the Astra; he drove to the roundabout and then over Greyfriars Bridge, on to the Ross road.

Cola said, ‘I’m not even called Cola French, it’s just the name I write under. But if your name was Tracey Gilbert, how would you play it?’

‘You said you’d lied when you said you weren’t involved.’ Lol drove south from the city. Not too many suburbs this side; you were soon out of the street lights. ‘What did you mean?’

‘She’s pretty,’ Cola said, stepping over the question. ‘She’s not what I imagined.’

‘No. What did you mean? Not involved in what?’

‘All right. That copper, the Liverpool guy, he asked Piers what kind of people went to his parties. Like, what kind of people would do sex magic? Like he thought it was all black robes and manacles and blood sacrifice. Well, yeah, some of that. Though you don’t realize when you start. You think it’s just games. Risky games, but still games.’

‘And you were involved in that?’

‘It was like, how can you be a writer if you haven’t lived? At first. And then you think, do I really want to be that kind of writer? And that’s when you know it’s bad. I don’t mean bad, I mean evil. There’s a difference, isn’t there? I mean I’ve been bad lots of times, but I don’t think I’ve ever been evil. Because that’s a thing in itself, isn’t it? A commitment. No going back.’

‘So when did you get out?’

‘When I knew where it was coming from, of course. I mean… shit.’

‘Cromwell Street.’

‘I read about it. I went and got the books.’

‘From Piers?’

‘You’re joking.’ She was hunched up in the seat as though she was very cold. ‘See, he did a lot of stuff nobody could explain. He’d travelled a bit, been to sea, mixed with all kinds of weirdos. Picked up stuff he maybe didn’t understand.’

‘West?’ Lol put the heater on; sometimes it worked.

Yeah. He had all these weird ideas that were maybe just an excuse for kinky sex. There was all this stuff where he was trying to like mix his sperm with the sperm of these other guys who were giving it to Rose. I won’t go into details, but it was like he was planning to create some kind of super-race situation. Genetic experiments. Well, you don’t have to be a bloody biologist to know what kind of bollocks that is. I mean, it’s a joke, right? In the scientific sense. Where did he get it from? Where did he get those ideas?’

Lol said, ‘You mean it only makes sense at all from an occult viewpoint.’

‘Something like that.’

‘And Lynsey?’

‘Yeah,’ Cola said, ‘I think you could say something made a sick kind of sense to Lynsey.’

47 Requiem

MERRILY WAS SURE she heard this: ‘You were warned.’

From one of the men in the porch. Just like that. You were warned. Some urban lout with a degree in computer science introducing pseudo-gangland into rural village life. She didn’t recognize his face, couldn’t even see it properly, but she thought she recognized the voice from the phone, muffled under a handkerchief.

‘If one of you was the threatening caller,’ she said tiredly, ‘I took your advice. You said if we held the funeral on Friday I’d regret it. This is Wednesday.’

‘At night?’ Piers Connor-Crewe said. ‘You’re actually holding a clandestine funeral… at night?’

‘Hold on – threats?’ Fergus Young’s sharpened voice raised a silence. He turned to his companions. ‘What does she mean?’ He turned to Merrily. ‘We’d just concluded a meeting at the Village Hall with the MP – to discuss aspects of possible Government funding, when we saw lights in the church. Are you saying you’ve been physically threatened?’

As well as Connor-Crewe and Chris Cody, Merrily recognized the fat man from the Post Office and Stores, who had said, We ain’t rolling over for this one, no way. She didn’t know any of the others.

‘It was just the one call,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t matter. I’m not making a thing about it.’

It does matter.’ Fergus’s long face hardened. He wore a dark suit and a tie tonight. ‘We don’t descend to that level. We’re not thugs. Does anybody here know who was responsible for that? Richard?’

‘Not me, Fergus,’ the Post Office man said. ‘But I know a lot of people were upset when Lodge got tied in with Fred West.’

Fergus, already taller than the rest of them, seemed to rise up further, his chin jutting. ‘Well, I would like very much to know who was prepared to risk tarnishing this community’s reputation. We are civilized people, we are educated people. We do not issue anonymous threats to members of the clergy or anyone else.’

Bizarre. It was the first time Merrily had seen him behaving like an old-fashioned headmaster. He treated the kids at school as equals, but seemed about to threaten these adults with mass detention unless the culprit confessed.

She was worried. If it emerged now that Melanie Pullman’s body had been found, the entire village would be up here within ten minutes. Melanie left to rot in the soil while her murderer lay here in state, the subject of a requiem eucharist, no less. How did that look?

Huw Owen met her gaze and looked thoughtful for a moment. Then he smiled, stepped to the doors and, just when she thought he was going to slam them in Fergus’s face, flung both of them open like the church was a bingo hall.

‘Gents. Huw Owen, my name. The Church, in its old-fashioned way, didn’t feel it were appropriate for a lady minister to conduct the funeral service for a murderer. Not on her own, in such a hostile community. I’m back-up.’

‘Look, I apologize,’ Fergus said tightly. ‘However, this remains a betrayal of our—’

‘Please!’ Huw lifted his hands. ‘Let me explain. All we’ve got here is a simple memorial service. Something the Diocese feels is essential to clear the atmosphere surrounding a chain of events going back… oh, quite a long way.’

He stepped back into the nave. Richard, from the shop, saw the coffin. ‘Bloody hell, he is here.’

Huw went to stand by the coffin and put a hand on it, almost affectionately. ‘First, I should tell you that, without wanting to appear to bow to any kind of pressure – particularly the kind of drunken behaviour we observed the other night – Mr Lodge here has now said he’d be quite happy for this lad to be consigned to the flames.’

Cherry Lodge looked up at her husband, as if afraid he was going either to deny it or change his mind. But Tony Lodge said nothing.

Fergus looked at both the Lodges and smiled stiffly. ‘We all know Underhowle’s emerging from half a century of hardship. All we want is for it to be known as a decent and progressive place. Not some sinister haunt of darkness and perversity, famous for its murderer. I’m sorry if that sounds blunt.’

‘Blunt’s my language, lad,’ Huw assured him. ‘Let’s all be blunt. Now, we’re here as Christians, and all we want is to send this lad to his maker – not, as you seem to be insinuating, in a furtive way, but along a path lit by truth and honesty. He’s avoided earthly justice, but that’s not the end of it as far as we’re concerned, as you can imagine.’

Merrily thought, God, he’s good.

Huw stepped away from the coffin, rubbing his nose.

‘We didn’t want a circus, and we didn’t want the press lads here. And we honestly didn’t think it were likely that any of you would want to join us. However, seeing as you are here…’

There was some shuffling. Richard mumbled something about having to get home for a phone call at ten, and he started backing towards the door. Some of the others hadn’t even bothered to come in.

Ingrid Sollars said, ‘Personally, I think it would be very appropriate if the members of the Development Committee – as representatives of the future of Underhowle – were to assist Mr Owen and Mrs Watkins and the Lodge family to draw a line under this whole miserable episode.’

There was silence. Huw waited, smiling his placid, benign- priest smile.

‘Very well,’ Fergus said. ‘Why not? Thank you. Let’s end this discord.’

‘Wonderful!’ Huw went over to the doors. ‘We have any more committee members?’

Chris Cody came in, looking uncomfortable. He wore a dark brown overcoat that almost reached the stone flags, a leather cap that he pulled off. Connor-Crewe, still in his cream suit, shambled in after him, scowling. Merrily noticed Gomer slipping out.

Huw pulled the doors to and rubbed his hands.

‘Bit parky in here, but that’ll sharpen our senses, won’t it? Take a pew. Where were we up to, Merrily?’

‘Well, we…’ Merrily stood under the pulpit as Cody and Connor-Crewe went to sit in the pew behind Ingrid Sollars and Sam Hall, and Fergus sat alone behind the Lodges. ‘As you can see, this is rather an unusual service. With so few of us, we decided to dispense with the hymns, but we’ll be taking communion later. Perhaps Huw could…’

… Get me out of this again.

‘Aye.’ Huw took up a position across the chancel arch, to the left of the coffin. ‘Happen we should explain what we’re at to God, eh? Let’s start with a prayer.’

Cherry Lodge was the first to kneel, Connor-Crewe the last. Connor-Crewe kept his eyes open, which Merrily knew because she didn’t close hers either – nerves. She was aware that at some point Huw had switched off the lamps at the bottom of the nave, so that this small but significant congregation was pooled in light, while the shadows behind suggested there were others back there in the darkness.

Huw began softly: ‘Lord, we come here tonight in all humility, with a full awareness of our own ignorance. We come here on behalf of certain sad, unquiet spirits on either side of the Divide. We come… to seek healing.’ He paused, then his voice roughened. ‘But we realize that, before there can be healing, there must be knowledge of the condition. Secrets must be laid open. There must be truth. Help us to find that truth. Hold up your lantern for us. Throw its light into the blackest, dingiest corners of human experience, where only the lamp of the wicked flickers with its bilious flame. Help us. Through Jesus Christ, amen.’

There was a hollow hush. They were all watching Huw, even Piers Connor-Crewe.

But Huw was looking at Merrily.

‘Your show, lass. I believe you were about to address the subject of our friend here. Roddy.’

Cairns was nauseatingly wonderful, of course. Eirion was right, Eirion was always right about these things, and one day she would tell him. But anxiety brought Jane out before the end, slipping up the aisle during the climactic applause for something epic called ‘The Comb Song’, and standing at the back, examining the entire audience, row by row, left to right.

Mum was not there.

Check again. Her gaze tracked systematically along the backs of heads, right to left this time. Definitely not there.

It was nearly nine-thirty p.m. At first it had been anger: nobody should have missed Lol’s totally mesmerizing, electrifying comeback, least of all the woman purporting to be in love with him. It was just a complete, total insult.

But in the electric brightness of the foyer, she admitted that Mum was not like that, never had been. Mum always felt responsible.

Emotions cocktailed inside Jane, making her feel slightly queasy. She could hear the music, Cairns’s voice all smoky- smooth. She thought she’d spotted Eirion in there, worship- ping. Maybe she could crawl down the aisle, throw herself at his trainers.

She went to the entrance and pulled out her mobile. Sometimes, Mum would leave a message for her on the answering machine. She put in the number.

Hello, this is Ledwardine Vicarage…’ She keyed the code, waited, heard several bleeps.

‘Merrily, this is Ted…’ Didn’t even listen to that one. ‘Flower, this is me…’ Right.

‘… Look, I’m really, really sorry I missed you this morning. No excuses apart from being completely knackered, and if this all goes as badly as I suspect it’s going to… and, God forbid, I don’t make it tonight, I’ve told Lol, so please look out for Lol afterwards, OK? I’m sorry.’

Yeah. She hung on in case Mum had called back with an update.

Bleep.

‘Merrily, it’s Jennifer Box. It’s… I don’t know what time it is, it’s dark. Please help me. He’s defiled the chapel, he’s defiling everything. He’s the evil you are fighting. And, dear God, he’s coming back.’

Merrily stood there, behind the lectern with her prayer book on it. The lectern, which stood to the left of the pulpit, was a dark mahogany stand with a brass eagle, wings spread to hold the heaviest old Bible. Apart from in the oldest churches, the lecterns – like this one – were always too high for her.

She was very aware of the grave-dirt on the hem of her alb.

Earlier, before Gomer had come in with his lamp, she’d planned to address the subject of Roddy’s afflictions, the multiple pressures on him, of which perhaps no one here was fully aware. Hoping that, by the end of it, she’d at least have planted the seeds of understanding and something would come of it. One day.

It was different now. The atmosphere was charging up. Soon, arc lights would be burning in the churchyard, tapes would go up, police would guard the site until dawn. Then statements would be taken; they’d all be making statements in the search for a kind of truth that perhaps wouldn’t be the truth at all. And there would certainly be no sympathy for Roddy Lodge.

She became aware that she was clutching Melanie’s angel, very tightly, in her right hand. It felt almost hot.

Truth. Directness. Simplicity.

‘I…’ Because of the height of the lectern, she was almost speaking into her prayer book. ‘I met Roddy Lodge just the once. I was with my friend Gomer, who was convinced Roddy had started a fire that killed his nephew. Roddy was manic, dancing about as if he was on strings. He was talking a lot of rubbish about all the famous people he’d installed drainage for. All lies. While there, on his trailer, not ten yards away, lay the decomposing body of Lynsey Davies.’

Merrily looked up, registering the surprise on the faces of people who, at every funeral they’d hitherto attended, had listened to all the bad stuff being swept under the pews.

‘Gomer was wrong, as it turned out. Roddy Lodge didn’t start the fire; he was nowhere near there that night. But Roddy had a reputation – as a liar, a crook. And Gomer – and there isn’t a nicer, more well-meaning bloke in my village – had demonized him. The way that, first this village, and then maybe the whole country has done since. Demonization – a lot of it about. A monster.’ She tapped the coffin lid. ‘There’s a monster in here. What do we do about him?’

She stared at them, helpless.

‘I thought I wouldn’t have anything to do with Roddy Lodge ever again. But then another friend, a detective from Hereford, said Roddy remembered me from that night and wanted to speak to me. Well, that never happened, in the end – he’d acquired a solicitor, who didn’t want him to speak to me or anybody else, and yet allowed him to make a very wide-ranging confession. I gather a few of you know him – Mr Nye? Ryan Nye?’

She looked at Chris Cody. He’d taken off his leather cap. His once-shaven head had grown into a tight, light-brown bristle.

‘Yeah, we… we figured Lodge ought to have a brief.’ He looked a lot younger, somehow: a street kid, the tearaway who’d discovered a massively lucrative talent. ‘We’d used Ryan when

546 we was buying the chapel off of Roddy. We put work his way when we can.’

‘You sent him to represent Roddy?’

‘We… yeah. We figured he needed a brief.’

Merrily nodded. ‘Mr Nye stopped me talking to Roddy, and I was glad. We’re trying to build a spirit of honesty here, so, yes – shamefully – I was glad I didn’t have to talk to a monster. I knew he was a monster, because I’d seen his bedroom, plastered with pictures of famous women, all dead, with parts of nude pin-ups added. Obscene, degrading, sick. A monster – my mate, the detective, wanted to dig up every Efflapure in the county, fully expecting bodies underneath some of them, and I’m thinking, yes, it’s possible.’

She wondered where Frannie Bliss was now. How he’d react when Gomer told him about Melanie. The sensible thing would be to call Headquarters, which meant she and Huw didn’t have much time. And with a eucharist to organize…

‘And then the next night, Roddy wanted to come home, so they brought him back. He’d confessed to three murders – all the murders that my friend, the detective, had put it to him that he’d done. Why was he so keen to confess, to come back here and show the police where he’d buried the bodies? Had Mr Nye told him it was for the best? Why would Mr Nye tell him that?’

She looked at Chris Cody, who looked perturbed.

‘Well, Mr Nye isn’t here, so we can’t get any enlightenment there. But there was another good reason why Roddy Lodge found Hereford Police Headquarters – with its mass of equipment, its radio transmitters and especially its almost subterranean interview rooms – an unbearable place to be. Because Roddy had become electrically hypersensitive. He had to get out of there and he didn’t care what it took.’

Merrily moved out in front of the lectern, feeling more confident.

‘But there was more to it than electrical pollution; there had to be.’

She talked about Roddy’s childhood, his isolation in an all-male household, his manufacture of a series of mother substitutes, the peculiar comfort he found in the realm of the dead – nothing essentially morbid in it, a way of coping, a world he felt he could control.

‘Can we say he was psychic? Can we say he actually began to see the dead? Had he developed what some people like to call mediumistic faculties? Sam would say he was simply the victim of hallucinations, caused by the effects of force fields on the brain. All I know is that it was something he was allowed to grow up with, something that was never discussed.’

She didn’t look at Tony Lodge; this wasn’t an inquisition. Tony Lodge didn’t say anything.

‘We do know that Roddy was becoming disturbed by his condition, because he went to see the doctor. Who, like most GPs, seems to have believed in neither psychic powers nor EH. And who referred him to the Rector. Who gave him some advice which was… well meant.’

Ingrid Sollars made a small, contemptuous noise.

‘In fact, there seems to have been only one person with whom Roddy Lodge was able to discuss his condition. And that was Melanie Pullman, a girl who was also experiencing problems of an apparently psychic nature… which Sam believes to have been a result of living very close to power lines and other signals. I’ve had access to some background on Melanie Pullman. On balance, the evidence of some electrical stimulation of parts of the brain does seem, in her case, to be the most persuasive explanation. But Melanie’s not… here to discuss it.’

Merrily heard the muffled clunk of the door latch and saw figures moving in the shadows. Gomer. And Frannie Bliss. Nobody else.

‘My feeling is that Melanie was good for Roddy. The evidence is that they had a close relationship. She was probably his first real girlfriend. There was nobody else in Roddy’s life at that time – as far as I can tell.’

‘It’s true.’ Cherry Lodge was leaning over the prayer-book shelf. Her face was flushed. ‘He was never any kind of a ladies’ man. He wasn’t smooth and he wasn’t that bright, if you want the truth. Never a girlfriend when he was young – Tony’ll tell you. Tell them.’

Tony grunted. ‘Embarrassed him, women did, when he was at home. Afterwards, he embarrassed us, all the tales. And the sports car. Nobody in our family ever had a sports car.’

‘What changed?’ Merrily said. ‘What made him… in a woman we call it promiscuous, but in a man it’s “a bit of a lad”. I mean, when he was with Melanie he wasn’t like that, was he?’

‘She was a nice girl,’ Tony said. ‘Quiet. Nice-looking – I never knew what she saw in him.’

‘A soulmate, perhaps?’

‘Then why did he… ?’ He turned his face away.

Merrily said quickly, ‘Sam Hall found out about Melanie and tried to help her – with some success, I think. And Melanie, in turn, tried to help Roddy. Maybe she encouraged him to go to the same alternative practitioner who’d given her a device to wear around her neck to ward off electromagnetism. But Roddy didn’t want to know. I wonder why not?’

Frannie Bliss slid into a pew halfway down the nave, where the shadows began. ‘I think we both know that, don’t we, Merrily?’

She nodded as the other heads turned. ‘What’s happening, Frannie?’

‘Nothing special,’ Bliss said coolly. ‘Thought I’d see how things’ve changed in the so-called Church of England before I made any kind of move.’

Merrily saw Piers Connor-Crewe bounce a disdainful glance from Bliss to her. ‘You two lovers or something? I think we should be told.’

‘Uncalled for, Piers,’ Fergus Young snapped.

‘Fergus, I’m so tired of these shallow, nit-picking people. Why do we even care about the mental state of the waste of space in that box? As for this bloody little woman trying to find a new role for the ailing Church in some sort of spiritual- criminal profiling…’

Merrily said, ‘What did Lynsey Davies say about Roddy Lodge, Piers? Did she think he was a waste of space? I suspect not.’

‘Get off my back, Mrs Watkins.’

‘I think Lynsey found him extremely interesting. Because of what he was – i.e. someone apparently in day-to-day contact with the dead… of whom he had no fear whatsoever. And because he was the owner of Underhowle Baptist chapel. Which for her had become a kind of shrine.’

She looked at Huw, but he didn’t react. The angel was almost burning in her hand.

‘There was a problem, of course: Roddy had a steady girlfriend, with whom he had a lot in common. And Melanie, who seems to have suffered for years from EH, was suddenly – thanks to Sam – discovering a possible cause. And a possible solution.’

She looked at Sam, guessing that she was reaching a conclusion he’d come to several minutes ago. He left his pew and went to stand in the aisle, slowly punching a fist into a palm.

‘She was trying to persuade Roddy to go to the same alternative practitioner, to understand what she was now convinced was the real nature of the problem. Maybe she would’ve succeeded. Maybe she’d have helped him, if…’ She opened her hand and let the angel dangle on its broken chain. ‘If…’

‘If Lynsey Davies hadn’t killed her first,’ Sam said.

Merrily looked down at her prayer book. ‘Or persuaded someone else to do it?’

48 The Make-over

‘AH YES,’ MOIRA Cairns said, like she’d just remembered something vaguely distasteful. ‘Hi, Jane.’

‘I don’t understand.’ Jane stepped away from the box office, dismayed. ‘This woman says Lol’s gone.’

Cairns was looking smaller and somehow younger in jeans and this big Hebridean sweater, her hair tied up, the make-up washed off.

‘Aye,’ she said. ‘He had to leave.’

Leave? The big star gone off with some major international promoter, some record company exec. Goodbye to the old life. Hello hotel rooms, hello groupies.

Jane bit her lip, feeling isolated among the crowd in the foyer, probably the only one of them who was here alone and now would leave alone. Come to support Lol, and he’d triumphed and gone. She’d twice called Mum’s mobile to tell her about that call from Jenny Box, if she didn’t already know about it. Nothing – switched off.

‘I said I’d run you home,’ Cairns said, autographing the sleeve of an old vinyl album some sad git had brought along. ‘Sorry about the shaky bit,’ she said to the sad git. ‘Must be ma age.’

‘You look younger than ever,’ the sad git said, going off, and Cairns blew him a kiss.

Jane looked down at the poisoned blade of betrayal. ‘What?’ Give me five minutes, OK?’ Cairns said. Jane said tightly. ‘I can get a bus.’ Of course, there was no late bus to Ledwardine midweek, and

she caught herself making swift glances to either side. Maybe Eirion? He must still be around. He couldn’t really have dumped her. Just because she’d come on like somebody spoiled and bitchy. He wasn’t like that. He loved her.

Or what she used to be. He’d loved what she used to be. Eirion would have come here to see Lol and Moira, no reason to seek out Jane. It was over.

‘Or I can get a taxi. I’ve got enough money.’

Moira pulled a bunch of keys from her jeans and tossed them at Jane. ‘Grey BMW, right down by the bottom entrance. I’ll be there in about five minutes. I just have to see Prof, OK?’

And she turned and walked off, the smug bitch, leaving Jane standing there, holding the keys.

Jane spun away, with a semi-sob, and walked out of the building into the squally air, gulping it in. Looked up in despair at the night over Hereford, saw a faded cluster of stars, small holes in worn denim. Gas balls in a barren universe.

None of them wanted to know her now, not Eirion, not even Lol. She was spoiled and peevish and stupid; she was negative. She’d grown up a negative person in a negative world, this floating cyst of dying matter about which everything was known. A world that had peaked some time ago, and all scientists were doing about it was shrinking it more rapidly, while finding ways of keeping you alive longer so that you could go on and on being crapped on.

Halfway across the car park, seeing a couple of guys in their twenties watching her, she caught herself actually starting to think of the several individuals who would be twisted with guilt for the rest of their lives when she was found raped and murdered behind one of the warehouses off the Holmer Road or just killed, in a cursory way by some heroin addict, for her mobile.

In the end, she just found Moira’s BMW and let herself in and locked the doors to keep out the junkies and the rapists.

Then she made another fruitless attempt to call Mum and tell her about Jenny Driscoll, who had been so anxious to see her before the funeral on Friday, possibly because of something this guy Humphries had turned up in Underhowle. But the funeral had happened. It was all over. Mum should be home now.

Should be home.

Jane rang home, and listened to all the messages again, ending with Dear God, he’s coming back.

Like Gareth Box was some kind of rapist/slasher.

Poor Driscoll. She wasn’t crass and superficial, just damaged. And likeable, really, another emotional refugee, although it was still hard to know how much of what she said you could seriously believe. The angel stuff: I’m not claiming to be Bernadette. I don’t care whether anyone believes me. And then: I saw it, Jane. And she was beautiful. Was that the final confirmation that Mum was the angel?

Yet nothing sexual – could you believe that? You certainly believed it when she said it last night; you grabbed it gratefully, squeezed it to your bosom: Oh thank you, thank you. But now? How did you feel about Jenny Driscoll, with hindsight?

Jane said, ‘Oh God.’

God who did not exist, who just served now as an all-purpose expression for dismay, confusion, exasperation, contempt – and fear.

By now, any semblance of a service had evaporated. There were eleven people and a corpse under the ice-cream lights, and no reason for anyone to be here any more, not even the corpse.

Yet nobody was trying to leave.

Merrily saw Frannie Bliss placing himself next to the church door, needing to contain everybody while he worked it all out, examining the cards in his hand, rearranging them, wondering which ones to throw away.

It was like this: if Lynsey Davies had killed Melanie Pullman, it threw up a new and plausible motive for Roddy to have killed Lynsey, a – God forbid – normal motive.

Arguably, a hot-blooded killing: Lodge had discovered that this warped and dangerous woman had murdered his girlfriend. The kind of killing, then, for which – had he lived to appear in court – he might well have ended up with no more than a couple of years in prison.

If Lynsey Davies was the only one he’d done. If the serial killing was something happening only in the dark mind of Lynsey Davies.

Did you confess just to get it over, to get the police off your back, the heat from your brain? Merrily put her hands either side of the pine coffin, just where Roddy’s head would be, cooled at last. She saw him scaling that pylon, gripping the steel skeleton of his personal tormentor, swinging up into the rigid, spindly arms of Kali the Destroyer, with the killer candles in her fingers.

Sam Hall was at the foot of the coffin, and their gazes met: what now? She didn’t know. If Roddy was going to the crematorium, there didn’t even need to be a funeral.

From over by the door, Frannie Bliss called, ‘Do we want to take this further? I don’t think I’m in any position to demand that everybody stays, but if I phone my boss – which is what I ought to do – I can guarantee a long night for some of us.’

Piers Connor-Crewe’s big, pale body twitched. ‘Are you going to tell us exactly what you’ve found?’

‘Found, Mr Crewe?’

Sam Hall said, ‘Merrily, you just raised the possibility that Lynsey Davies had someone else kill Melanie. You want to explain that?’

‘Well…’ She moved away from the coffin. ‘I think if we look at what we know about Lynsey…’

‘I know a bit more now, in fact,’ Bliss said. ‘Andy Mumford finally called. It’s not much, but it might make you think.’ He moved away from the door, resting a foot on a pew seat, hands on his knee. ‘Some of it we knew, but there’s no harm in going over it again. Lynsey – like Roddy, actually – grew up in a Nonconformist household on the edge of the forest – Drybrook or Lydbrook, one of those places. Her old feller was a coalman – one of the blokes who carted the sacks about, rather than ran the yard – and he was also the caretaker at his chapel. There were four kids, and Lynsey was the eldest. And the old man used to make them go twice on a Sunday to chapel. Strict. Very strict.’

‘He still alive?’ Sam asked.

‘No, neither parent, but Mumford talked to a sister, who hadn’t seen Lynsey in years but did remember things like how she was once suspended from school for bullying. And how much she hated the chapel.’

‘Figures,’ Sam said.

‘Actually, it wasn’t that simple,’ Bliss said. ‘Funny, these are things you’d never bother going into when somebody’s just “the victim”. Even less important when you’re just a victim – one of several. When we say she “hated the chapel”, we mean the organization, the religion. The actual building – this stark old place with the Dr Phibes harmonium – she bloody loved that. Used to pinch her old man’s keys and go in with her mates at night, playing.’

Merrily said, ‘Presumably, you don’t mean the harmonium.’ Bliss did his acid smile. ‘I think the games got more adventurous the older she became. And then one day – the sister’s not sure what happened, it being a serious scandal at the time and a great embarrassment for the family – one day traces of these activities were found by the cleaner. As a result of which, Mr Davies lost his position as part-time caretaker. And he was not a happy man. And he held Lynsey responsible.’

Mumford wasn’t sure what Mr Davies did to Lynsey, but there was certainly a long period of fear and loathing in that household, Bliss said. The sister had told Mumford they didn’t see much of Lynsey once she got into her middle teens. But there was a teacher who thought she was an intelligent girl with prospects and suggested she’d be better away from home, persuading the parents to let her go to this commercial college in Gloucester – possibly even arranging a grant.

Either way, Mr Davies was probably glad to see her go,’ Bliss said. ‘And I think some of us know the rest. So there you have it: an intelligent girl raised in a strict household starts to rebel against it from quite a tender age. Though tender’s not the word for Lynsey, is it? The suspension for bullying, the hints of early sexual adventures… all hinting at the bad things to come.’

‘And the use of religious premises in a sexual context?’ Merrily said.

‘Dead right. And we’re all looking at you, Mr Crewe. ’Cause of all the people here, we’re thinking, nobody knew Lynsey as well as Mr Crewe.’

Connor-Crewe didn’t look back at him. ‘I’ve told you all I know.’

‘You said you didn’t know about Lynsey being at Cromwell Street. I wonder if that’s true.’

‘If you want to accuse me of anything—’

Huw Owen said, ‘As Francis has raised the issue of Cromwell Street, I think we can all agree that his original theory of Lodge as a West obsessive has been turned on its head. It was Lynsey who was obsessed.’

Bliss shrugged.

‘Thank you, lad.’ Huw went to stand at the lectern. ‘Nobody likes to think of anybody, especially a woman, becoming so corrupted inside as to find inspiration and energy in a situation as foul as that. But we have to face it. Just as we had to face the fact that the number of lives destroyed by twenty years of carnage in Cromwell Street far exceeded the number of lives lost. Which itself may be a lot bigger than the list read out at the trial of Rosemary West.’

‘I’m sorry…’ Fergus Young looked like a man who’d been containing himself for as long as he reasonably could. ‘I don’t see the relevance of this. It’s frankly obscene. There’s no proven link between Underhowle and anything connected with West, and I really don’t think we should manufacture one. Lodge and Davies are both dead… gone… finished.’

‘No, lad. Nowt’s finished. If you don’t see the living darkness at the heart of this—’

‘Living darkness!’ Fergus stood up, his hair springing. ‘That is such nonsense! That’s defamatory nonsense.’

Huw held tight to the wings of the brass eagle. ‘See, I don’t usually talk like this to lay folk. It doesn’t help. But I’m looking at a woman who was drawing energy from a black hole, a place from which all kindness, tenderness, pity and moral awareness had been sucked out. Drawing energy from that. Can you understand?’

Merrily said softly, ‘I think we should look at what she was creating. With Melanie out of the way, she’d begun to reorganize Roddy’s life. Perhaps starting with something fairly innocent like setting up his sitting room as Roddy’s Bar – like the one at Cromwell Street. And then redecorating his bedroom.’

Cherry Lodge whispered, ‘Yes.’

‘There were two bedrooms in that bungalow – the one Roddy set up for himself, which was a bit old-fashioned. And the one I think Lynsey created for him, with black sheets and eroticized pictures of beautiful women who also happened to be dead. Reflecting the connection he was perhaps already making between sex and death, but… brutalizing it, I suppose. Like she was trying to turn him into… somebody else.’

Fergus said, ‘Somebody else?’

‘Work it out, lad,’ Huw Owen told him.

‘It’s preposterous!’

‘She also revamped his social calendar,’ Merrily said. ‘Poor Jerome Banks thinks he was the one who encouraged Roddy to go out and find some real girls. In fact, Lynsey was building up his confidence… and also turning him into a predator. Like people train hawks.’

She looked up at the sound of Piers Connor-Crewe edging out of his pew, making for the door. ‘I’ve heard enough.’

Bliss stood in his path. ‘I don’t think so, Piers.’

‘Are you actually attempting to detain me?’

I have some questions.’

‘Up your arse with them, inspector. I’ve had quite enough of you for one day.’

‘It’s just that I’ve been wondering: if Lynsey – or somebody else, other than Lodge – killed Melanie Pullman, who buried her? I’ve just recalled you saying this morning that Roddy lent you his digger, to put in some trenches near the chapel. Only, I was watching my good friend Mr Parry today. You could take a digger – as I presume Roddy often did – from his garage to this churchyard, along the path through the fields, in… what? Ten minutes? Bit longer at night?’

‘You’re insane.’

‘It’s just a thought, Piers. Neither you nor Lynsey would want Melanie buried near the Baptist chapel, if there was ever any chance of a real archaeological dig. Nowhere safer for a body than a graveyard. And who’d be next in there – Tony Lodge? Well, not in the near future, we all trust and hope. And anyway, as soon as they saw bone down there, it’d be, whoops… that’s another one slid down the hill, better move on a couple of yards.’

‘Unless they found this.’ Merrily held up the angel. ‘Bit of a give away. Was to us, anyway.’

The angel shone with a coppery light, brighter somehow than the lighting globes.

‘Yeh, that’s odd,’ Bliss said. ‘I can’t explain why they didn’t take that off her, dispose of it.’

A discreet cough from Gomer. ‘Likely di’n’t see him, ennit? If her weared him under her clothes, next to the skin, like, mabbe he wouldn’t be visible. At night, if they was in a hurry. But then the clothes starts to rot… up he comes.’

Thank you, Gomer.

He knew as well as she did that it couldn’t have happened like that, because the fabric of the clothes had not rotted. The angel shone from Merrily’s hand and burned with a soft heat. A witness. Perhaps it had found its own way to the surface.

‘What do you think, Piers?’ Bliss asked.

‘What should I think? I have no proof you’ve found anything at all.’

Bliss said steadily, ‘You planted her, pal. Let’s start with that, see where it gets us.’

‘You dare to accuse me of that – in front of all these witnesses?’

‘I’m feeling lucky.’ Bliss opened the door into the porch. ‘Go on, if you want. You go home and have a couple of glasses of your favourite fifteen-year-old malt and a good night’s sleep. Or maybe you’d prefer to lie awake all night and think about it, work out your story.’

Bliss was winging it, Merrily thought. He wouldn’t even have seen what was in the grave.

‘Or perhaps, if you want to be less public about it, you could drop in at police Headquarters tomorrow.’ Bliss held open the door and froze. He took a cautious step back, then relaxed, smiling thinly. ‘Ah, Mr Laurence Robinson, as I live and breathe.’

Merrily almost ran down the aisle. Lol stood in the doorway, smiled bashfully at her, the way he always did when she was in uniform. But the slanting alien eyes were watching sardonically from the region of his chest. Merrily stopped.

‘If you’ve come to collect the little woman, she may be a while yet.’ Bliss let Lol in and closed the door.

‘Who the hell’s this?’ Connor-Crewe was looking limp with unease now.

Lol said nothing. He went to stand with Gomer in a shadowed spot under a stone plaque commemorating Ald. Joseph Albert Persham: 1894–1966.

‘If you drop in at Headquarters,’ Bliss said to Connor-Crewe, ‘we can fingerprint you, take a little DNA swab… and that should put you in the clear.’

‘You don’t frighten me in the least,’ Connor-Crewe said. ‘You’re an ambitious little bastard, but of limited intelligence.’

‘He don’t need intelligence.’ Chris Cody was leaning wearily against a pew-end, rubbing his face and then looking over his fingers at Connor-Crewe. ‘And for what it’s worth, he frightens me. You got no idea, have you, Piers? You don’t know what these animals are like, mate.’

Merrily’s hand closed around the angel. She was staring, like everyone else, at this slightly built man in an oversized overcoat, who could buy and sell all of them and the church around them. Cody shook his head like he was sick of the whole thing.

‘It’s a murder inquiry now. They lose all sense of proportion on a murder, ’specially if it’s a woman or a kid. They’ll lie, they’ll plant evidence, they’ll have you on a fucking sandwich, mate. You’re this upper-class bastard who’s been to fucking Oxford. They love nailing a nob.’

‘Chris, what on earth are you…?’ Connor-Crewe was sweating.

‘You go out there,’ Cody said, ‘you’ll find another twenty coppers lined up like bleeding dominoes. I’m telling you, soon as I knew they had the body, I’m like, you know, this is it, we been set up. We walked into it.’

Merrily exchanged glances with Frannie Bliss. The tip of an angel wing was piercing her palm and she felt almost faint. But Bliss was deadpan, entirely relaxed, as if he’d been expecting this and wondered why it had taken them so long. But he hadn’t; inside, he’d be as shaken as she was. She looked around for Huw and found him sitting on the chancel step, leaning forward with his hands in prayer position between his knees, not looking at anyone, listening.

Bliss said, ‘Who killed Melanie, Mr Cody?’

Cody looked at Piers Connor-Crewe and shrugged.

‘Lynsey, of course,’ he said. ‘Oh yeah – and Fred West.’

Moira Cairns drove quite slowly out of Hereford, her face lightly tanned by the dashlight. Hands low down on the wheel, relaxed. Like they had been all night. Like she was totally unaware of the tension in Jane.

‘He was awfully good.’

‘Yes.’

‘Like, I was scared out ma mind when he first went out there but, Jesus, once he was into it, it was like this was the second week of his long-awaited world tour. And I guess the reason for that was he had something bigger on his mind.’

‘Mmm.’

A long pause as Cairns let this huge lorry come growling past. For Christ’s sake.

‘And you’re thinking Lol and I are making out, yeah?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Well, I’m sorry, too, if that’s way off,’ Cairns said, ‘but I couldnae think of a better reason for you behaving the whole time like a wee pain in the arse, you know?’

‘It’s the way I am,’ Jane said. ‘I am a pain in the arse.’ And then, as Cairns slowed right down for the Whitecross roundabout, she said, ‘Are you?’

‘Er… no. We’re not.’

‘Oh.’

‘Where’s Eirion, Jane?’

‘Dumped me.’

‘For being a pain in the arse?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Uh huh.’ Moira Cairns drove in silence for maybe half a mile. The road was quiet, too. Then she said, ‘But when life’s such a bitch, and the world’s this big kidney stone floating in a universe of liquid manure, where’s the point in not being a pain in the arse?’

Jane turned her head and looked directly at Cairns. Neither of them was smiling.

Jane moistened her lips. ‘Have you been speaking to Eirion?’

‘Not since the night the both of you were there, at Prof’s. And Eirion was doing most of the talking then. Why?’

‘Just… wondered.’

They hit the countryside, and she turned away to look out at the empty fields opening up on the left, all the way to the Black Mountains.

‘Tell me something, Jane. Does it make it worse when your mother’s a priest of God?’

How do you mean?’

‘Well, she’s up in the pulpit, telling a dwindling audience about the Kingdom of Heaven, and you’re thinking, what’s this shite?’

‘I wouldn’t say that to her.’

‘Or at least no more than twice a week.’

‘That’s not exactly—’

‘But, hell, if it’s what you think… ?’

Jane said, anguished, ‘It’s not what I used to think.’

‘But in those days you’d had no real experience of life, right?’

Jane slumped. It was like all her thoughts and fears had been laid out in this smorgasbord situation, and the Cairns woman was collecting a slice of this, a segment of that on a plate, and poking them with her fork, but not actually eating anything.

‘Next right,’ she said. And as they made the turn, at the sign pointing to Weobley, she rallied, hit back with the big one. ‘Do you believe in God?’

They must have driven for nearly a mile before the reply came. They were passing through a wooded stretch, no visible sky, the headlights on full.

‘Doesnae mean I have to like the bastard.’

‘What?’

‘God – whatever he/she is – if it thinks you can take it, it’s likely to give you a hard time. You want a nice life, the best way is to turn up for the weddings and funerals and don’t even think about any of it the rest of the time.’

‘But that—’

‘Or, of course, the other way is, whenever some shit comes at you, you say, Ah, well, it’s the Will of God. That works. That saves a lot of heartache.’

‘So your philosophy is what?’

‘You just heard it.’

‘I don’t think I believe you.’

‘But once in a while I forget, and I stick my head out the trench, then slam… two black eyes, chipped teeth, nosebleed.’

‘And when people say you’re psychic… ?’

‘Aw now, Jane, you know what a pile of crap that is.’

Jane said, ‘Can’t you go any faster?’

‘Probably. Would there be a good reason to?’

‘I don’t know,’ Jane said.

‘You could try telling me.’

Chris Cody looked over at Connor-Crewe. ‘There’s no point now, mate.’ He folded his arms, his back braced against the pew- end, and addressed Bliss. ‘One night, Piers asked me round, and there was four of us, Piers and me and Lynsey and this woman who worked for Piers down the shop, and – after some stuff – Lynsey says, “What would you like most in the world? Apart from this?” And she pulls up her… Anyway, that’s how it started.’

‘The magic.’ Bliss smiled.

‘I dunno what I was expecting – black robes and upside- down crosses, maybe, but it was nothing like that. Well, candles… bit of atmosphere. And a circle. Bit of mumbo-jumbo, but nuffing you couldn’t live with. The others had done it before, but Lynsey said that wasn’t a problem. She said outsiders could bring in new energy.’

‘Lynsey was in charge.’

‘Oh yeah. Piers was – I’m sorry, mate – like a bloody schoolgirl when Lynsey was there. Sometimes you felt she’d got more testosterone than any of us. Anyway, we were pretty small-time at the factory then – struggling, you know? And there was this contract I was after, to run a system for this new stationery manufacturer over at Tewkesbury, and Lynsey asks me to describe the place and talk about it, and then refine what I want into this like single image.’

‘Image?’ Huw said from the chancel steps.

‘I’m not telling you what it was, ’cause I’m superstitious. Wasn’t then, but I am now. The four of us had to fink about the image and then we sat in a circle, naked, almost touching, but not quite, and then—’

‘For God’s sake,’ Connor-Crewe snapped, ‘they can imagine the rest.’

‘And you got the contract,’ Merrily said.

Oh yeah. First of many that year. Before I went home, Lynsey told me some fings I could like… practise. Fings I could do…’ He grinned uncomfortably. ‘You know, on me own. To build up… the visualization skills in connection wiv… Anyway, the next time I went – no, the time after that – Roddy Lodge was there. I didn’t know who he was, but there was a hell of a… I mean it was incredible. Powerful, you know? It was like you’d taken somefing. Acid or somefing. At one stage, I could’ve sworn there was other people wiv us. Big black figures. Weird.’

‘This was still at The Old Rectory?’

‘Nah, this was in the chapel. The old Baptist chapel. I didn’t like it at first in there, it was a bit cold. I’m like, what’s the point of this? Then I found out.’ Chris Cody shook his head. ‘Roddy and that chapel – crazy. Energy, you know? You come out, you felt you could do anyfing.’

‘Was Roddy on his own?’ Bliss asked. ‘No Melanie?’

‘Nah. I didn’t know about Melanie then, but a few months later we goes along to the chapel – I mean, I’m well into it by then. I had a few qualms now and then, but bloody hell… Anyway, I get there, and Roddy’s on his way over, and there’s this girl like clinging to his legs and that, screaming at him – like does he want to destroy himself, don’t he realize what he’s getting into? And she’s crying and screaming and he’s trying to ignore it and he’s pulling away, but in the end she’s making so much of a scene he has to go back wiv her, and he don’t come in that night at all. And you could really tell the difference wivout him there. Somefing missing, you know? I can’t put this into words, but… somefing definitely missing.’

Merrily glanced at the coffin and caught Ingrid Sollars’s look. Ingrid was sitting straight-backed on the edge of her pew, as if she was on horseback.

‘There was a couple of other times Roddy didn’t show,’ Chris Cody said, ‘and we knew she was getting to him, wearing him down. One night we couldn’t get in – she’d been up and locked the chapel. Which was becoming our place by then – essential. We all knew it was moving now, like big time, and we was ‘scared of losing the momentum. One day, Piers says why don’t we buy it off of him?’

‘With your money, of course,’ Bliss said.

‘Yeah, well, I’d got a bit by then. And this was important. Like, it was all tied in – wivout what we had going there wouldn’t be no money. The energy we was generating, you know? I mean, I know what it must sound like coming out wiv all this in church and everything, but… it didn’t feel bad. It didn’t feel bad. Not then.’

Bliss said, ‘And you thought it might be better, given his domestic problems, if the chapel wasn’t owned by Roddy Lodge.’

‘Wasn’t as if it was worth much, and I felt it was putting something back. So we got Nye to arrange it. And the Development Committee was up and running, and we put in for grants, turn it into a museum. Course we’d still use it. Lynsey said that’d be cool, surrounded by all these ancient ritual artefacts and that.’

Bliss looked across at Ingrid Sollars. ‘Did you know about this?’

‘No, she didn’t,’ Cody said. ‘Nor did Fergus. And I bloody wish I never had, now.’

‘Why?’ Bliss asked innocently. ‘You were doing all right.’

‘Look, I’d probably still’ve been doing all right. I realize that now, but Lynsey was charismatic. She could make you believe anyfing, especially when it was all so… intoxicating. Like, it was around this time that Roddy gets the contract with Efflapure. Never looked back. Lynsey magicked it. Truth was, Lynsey knew this guy who was a director of Efflapure, and she rigged it – probably blackmailing the guy over something, knowing Lynsey. I found out later, but Roddy never knew. He fought she’d magicked it for him. Magicked it. Bleedin’ hell.’

‘Aye,’ Huw said. ‘That’s how it works. They operate outside the rules. All the rules. Sex, drugs, blackmail. You can never work out where it begins. Or quite where the evil seeps in.’

‘So you fixed up to buy the chapel,’ Bliss said.

‘Yeah. I’d just do fings on a whim then. I was flying, man.’

‘What was Roddy’s relationship with Lynsey around this time?’ Merrily asked. Oh… like he was hypnotized. It was pretty much like you said. She was giving him the make-over.’

‘And Melanie?’

‘She went away for a few weeks. She was ill and she went away, and Lynsey just moved in. Wiv Roddy. And she had him. I mean really had him in her hand. And then this complete make-over. We didn’t know what was happening then, but I never seen a bloke change so fast. And then Melanie’s back. Looking really well, you know? Fresh. I mean, she was a nice girl. And, like the vicar said, she was on at Roddy to get treatment. We didn’t know what that was about, but Lynsey did, and that’s when fings started happening… like very fast. We – me and Piers – we get summoned to the Baptist chapel.’

‘By Lynsey?’

‘Yeah. When you was summoned, you went, mate. You didn’t get her angry, you couldn’t predict what she was gonna… So we went. It was one afternoon, and Roddy was out on a job for Efflapure, and Lynsey’s there alone, except for this big thick plastic sack. Lynsey and a sack. Like she’s just collected the rubbish for the tip. Never forget that fucking sack, tied up with orange baler twine. She opens it up, so we can see in. Jesus.’

‘Melanie?’ Bliss said.

Cody rubbed his eyes. ‘Worst fing I’ve ever seen.’

‘How?’ Bliss said.

‘Strangled. Froat was all black, you know? Tongue out. Stiff. Rigor mortis. And the fucking smell. And Lynsey’s shouting at us. “Come on… move yourselves. Get this out.” And I knew if we didn’t help her… I mean you didn’t know which way she’d go. She wasn’t safe.’

Merrily came closer and realized he was rubbing his eyes because he was crying. Cody looked at her.

‘She said she done it for Fred West. She said Fred West had been wiv us from the start, when we was… doing the business, the rituals. Fred fucking West. Over our shoulders. She said he—’

Huw Owen spoke over Merrily’s shoulder.

‘Liked to watch?’

49 Apocryphal

AS THEY FILED down the hill into the half-lit street, Sam Hall said, ‘Maybe we oughta be chanting a litany. Like, in the darkest hour of the plague, when the minister led a procession through Ross?’

Huw, who was leading them, rounded on him. ‘It’s not a school outing. Best if we don’t even talk.’

He was afraid of shattering the spell, Merrily thought. Dissolving the horror before its time. To keep this little ragbag congregation, he needed them all to accept the continued reality of the evil, needed to keep the lamp of the wicked held aloft, lest anyone should start to see this as no more than a sordid tale of small-town ambition and sexual games gone catastrophically wrong.

She was still holding Melanie’s angel like a talisman, apprehensive. He might know what he was doing, but was he the right person to be doing it? Oh yes, they’d been in the wrong place, Huw had known that from the beginning. Lodge? Leave him be, lass. Who’s he harming now? We’ll do the chapel.

Huw scenting the enemy.

Lol walked beside Merrily. She sensed a calm around him, which meant the concert had either been a big success or a monumental failure. He’d whispered that Moira was taking care of Jane. Moira? Jane and Moira?

A police car slid past towards the church. Cody and Connor-Crewe had already been taken to Hereford in separate cars. Bliss had not arrested either of them, simply asking, with a certain savage courtesy, if they’d care to discuss it in more depth.

What would the charges be? Accessories to the concealment of a murder? Cody said he and Piers had taken the body through the fields in the early hours, on a trailer pulled by a quad bike. Maybe they could simply have shopped Lynsey, Cody said, and still saved their business lives – all they’d done was participate in what would be known as ‘sex orgies’. No big deal, these days, even out here in the sticks.

Merrily suspected that Lynsey had had more on them than they would ever disclose.

Bliss had seen them into the cars. Then he’d made a short call and cut the connection and waited. Within three minutes the phone had buzzed. Bliss had listened with a foxy little smile, and then said, ‘No real need for you to turn out at this hour, boss.’ Then, cutting the connection again, he’d said ruefully, ‘Fleming’ll be here in just over an hour.’

Gomer had stayed behind with Bliss, to show the Durex suits where to dig.

As she walked towards the crossroads, with the old duffel coat over her alb, Merrily was still hearing: Done it for Fred West… wiv us from the start.

Fred West, several years dead, who liked to watch. It was all that Huw had needed.

They were passing the school now. Fergus Young held up his long head, his hair high in the wind, and didn’t give it a single sideways glance.

How much had he known? He must have known something.

At the bottom of the hill, past the steel-shuttered Post Office and Stores and the Head Office unisex hair salon, Cherry Lodge waited for Merrily and whispered, ‘We won’t come with you, if that’s all right.’

‘Nobody could expect you to.’

‘I feel somehow empty inside now,’ Cherry said. ‘Do you know what I mean? These were the very people who came to our door, asking us to see some sense, not damage the community.’

Merrily squeezed Cherry’s arm. ‘At least you know now why they were so keen to prevent Roddy going into that grave.’

It didn’t take much to spark a protest, not with people like Richard, the newsagent, around – a word here, a word there, a suggestion that the value of your property might be damaged.

‘And if you want to arrange something at Hereford Crematorium, soon as you like, I’d be happy to do it properly.’

‘Thank you,’ Cherry said. ‘We might sleep tonight. Eventually.’

Merrily raised a hand as the Lodges walked away, following their lamp up the narrow lane to their bleak farm on the hill above the place that was, or wasn’t, Ariconium.

What would happen to all that now: the plans, the reconstructions, the suspect artefacts and the audio-visuals?

Underhowle… where nothing succeeded for long.

By the grimy gleam of the last street lamp, she saw the face of Ingrid Sollars and wondered about all the things Ingrid must have chosen not to see for the sake of progress. And yet, in this light, you might have thought Ingrid’s expression was actually one of relief.

But then, Ingrid couldn’t know what Huw had in mind, as he brought out a stubby torch to lead the rest of them past the darkened community hall and out of the village towards Roddy Lodge’s garage and the track to the old Baptist chapel.

No wonder he didn’t want to talk to anyone.

Jane saw Jenny Box as soon as they came into the square at Ledwardine.

It was just on closing time at the Black Swan, and some people were leaving, urged into their vehicles by an irritable wind.

Jane saw James Bull-Davies and Alison Kinnersley, who she was sure she’d spotted at the Courtyard – could have got a lift with them if she’d realized in time. She saw Jim Prosser back from the Eight-till-Late, and she saw her appalling ex-schoolmates, Dean Wall and Danny Gittoes, going into the Swan in the hope of a last pint.

And then, between the rainy haloes around the fake gaslamps, she saw Jenny moving across the square – not from the pub, but from the other side, from the direction of her home, Chapel House. Jenny Box, with her scarf over her head like the Virgin Mary and that flickering, flinching blur passing across her face, as she paused on the edge of the cobbles as if looking for a light in the vicarage, before turning back.

‘Moira, stop!’

Moira braked. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘It’s her. Jenny Driscoll.’

‘Where?’

‘Just going… the woman with the white scarf over her head.’

‘Uh huh,’ Moira said.

‘She doesn’t know this car. Did you see?’

‘What?’

‘The look on her face. That look she has – as if her expression’s out of synch with her feelings.’

Moira pulled up on the edge of the square, where you weren’t supposed to park. In the last fifteen minutes, Jane had just kept talking, without thinking, like someone did when they were drunk: talking about Jenny Box and the angel, which seemed to have brought everything to a crisis. Telling Moira Cairns what she’d never told anyone – about the night she’d drunk wine with Gareth Box and fallen under his spell and the spell of the house: autumn wine and firelight, the sheer intoxication of it, the first time in weeks that she’d found any texture in her life.

And then about last night, walking these streets with Jenny – how weird that had been – discovering that she actually liked this manipulator, this hate-figure. Finding that she could understand Jenny’s aching need for a true spiritual refuge, somewhere she could feel safe from abuse, safe from hypocrisy.

Not daring, while she was saying all this, even to look at Moira Cairns, who had been, after all, the other significant hate-figure in her recent life.

‘Jane.’ Moira cut the headlights. ‘Seriously. What do you think is happening here?’

‘I reckon Gareth Box is in her house, and she’s afraid to go back there. She said he’d defiled her chapel.’

‘How?’

‘I don’t know, it was only a message on the machine. She’s obviously looking for Mum, but there’s nobody in at the vicarage. She doesn’t know about this funeral, you see. She thought it was on Friday. She’s confused, messed up. You could see that.’

‘OK,’ Moira said. ‘Why don’t we just make sure first that your Mum really isnae back yet?’

Jane salvaged a smile. ‘Before you stick your head out of the trench?’

‘That your house?’

‘Just behind those trees.’

‘All right. I’ll find somewhere safer to park and I’ll wait for you here.’

‘And then what?’

‘Might be a wee bit premature to call the police. We’ll go knock on this woman’s door.’

‘Right.’ Jane slid out of the car. She was aware of the sharpness of the wind and the shape of the cobble under her shoe: texture.

When they reached the chapel, Merrily was thinking: Question everything.

The feeling was confirmed once they were inside the wooden porch and Ingrid had pulled her keys out, while Huw put down his bag of wine and wafers, lurched ahead with his torch and tried the door.

Which, thank God, stayed shut.

‘You wanted it to be open, didn’t you?’ Merrily said in dismay. ‘Just like in the stories.’

Huw didn’t reply. He levelled his torch beam at the lock so that Ingrid could fit her key. He wanted it to be open. He wanted someone waiting there for him.

From just outside the porch door, someone said hesitantly, ‘Would this be the one about how, if you find the door open and you go in, something’s… ?’

‘Lol?’ Merrily stared at the compact silhouette against the sludgy sky.

‘It’s just that I’ve had another long talk with the person who started it all,’ Lol said. ‘Who was asked by Lynsey Davies to plant the story. As an experiment. She had to sit in a café in Ross, where the schoolkids go, and tell the story to some friends in a very loud voice.’

‘That actually happened?’

‘Must’ve been all over the school by going-home time,’ Lol said. ‘What happened after that was that Lynsey would borrow Piers’s keys some nights and go down and unlock the chapel door. So that, you know, sometimes it was locked and sometimes…’

Sometimes kids, like Zoe Franklin and Martin Brinkley, would be able to walk into the hollow vastness of it, and the air would be vibrant with the power of suggestion. Could it be that simple?

Ingrid Sollars sounded relieved. ‘I’d never have admitted it, but that scared me. If I had to come down here after dark, I’d get Sam to come with me.’ She looked over her shoulder at Lol. ‘I’m sorry – I don’t even know who you are.’

‘This is Lol Robinson,’ Merrily said comfortably. ‘Him and me – we’re like you and Sam, only even more secretive.’ She started to laugh.

Huw snarled, ‘Shush!’ He turned the handle and slammed his shoulder against the door. ‘That changes nowt.’ He went in roughly, the door juddering. ‘Lights!’

Ingrid followed him in and snapped down the switches. The filaments in the hanging bulbs strained to reveal what they could of the former Underhowle Baptist Chapel in all its shabby splendour – and of the Reverend Huw Owen who, with his dusty, scarecrow hair and his liver-spotted dog collar, was looking suddenly like the minister it deserved.

‘In fact,’ Huw said, ‘what the lad’s just said makes it worse. The bitch was trying to feed it.’

He looked around the hacked-at walls, at the dust sheets hanging from the gallery. Then he moved into a shadowed area the size of a carport and came back dragging a plywood tea- chest, which he upturned and placed at the opposite end to the gallery, kicking shards of plaster into the corners.

‘Altar,’ he said.

The door just opened. As soon as Jane touched the knocker, the door fell away under her hand into the oaky darkness, and she stumbled forward into Chapel House.

Moira’s hand came from behind, took hold of Jane’s arm above the elbow and pulled her back.

‘All I did was touch it.’

‘I know,’ Moira said soberly.

‘Why would she leave it open? I mean, even in Ledwardine.’

‘She wouldn’t, Jane. She wouldnae do that.’

As they’d walked across the square from the lightless rectory, just a minute ago, Jane had seen Jenny Box at the top of these steps, at the door of Chapel House. She must have rushed in, leaving the door unsecured.

But there were no lights on inside. The wrought-iron lantern over the adjacent alley also remained unlit, just like the other night.

‘If you want the absolute truth, Jane,’ Moira said, ‘I do not like the feel of this.’

Jane held on to the railing and glanced back down the steps. Just a few doors away, the Black Swan was fully lit, a couple of men chatting by the entrance. A car door slammed on the square. The whole situation was absolutely normal.

‘Look,’ she said, ‘we’re going to look stupid if we start raising the alarm and then it’s nothing. It’s not like this is some remote—’

Shush a minute.’ Moira slipped inside.

‘Can you hear something?’

‘I won’t hear a bloody thing if you don’t— Just stay there, all right?’

‘What are you doing?’

‘I’m trying to… OK, c’mere a minute.’

Jane stepped into the darkness. She thought for a moment that she could smell the beautiful, sensuous scent of apple wood, but then she couldn’t.

‘What’s that?’ Moira said.

‘Oh.’

There was this gilded sliver in the middle distance, low down in the darkness.

‘Don’t move, hen.’ She could hear Moira’s hand sliding about on the wall, and then the lights came on: subdued, concealed lamps sheening the old oak panels.

Something was lying on the floor. Jane clutched Moira’s arm.

‘It’s a rug,’ Moira said, ‘rolled up. But what’s that alongside?’

The golden bar was a slit in the floor, a light on underneath it.

‘Trapdoor,’ Jane whispered. ‘That has to be her chapel down there.’

Moira called out, ‘Hello! You left your front door open!’

Nothing.

Moira went and tapped on the trapdoor. ‘Hello down there? Mrs Box?’

‘There’s a ring handle.’

‘Yes, Jane, I can see the ring handle.’ Moira sighed and pulled it. The trapdoor came up as easily as the front door had opened, as if it was on a pulley system, uncovering a mellow vault of light.

‘I’ll go down,’ Jane said. ‘She knows me.’

‘You bloody well will not go down.’ Moira called out, ‘Hello! You OK down there, Mrs Box?’ She pulled a face and put a foot on one of the stone steps.

‘Be careful.’

‘Aye.’ Moira went down. She wasn’t creeping, she was clattering, which was sensible. If Jenny was holed up in there, expecting trouble, best not to scare her.

Moira was down there like for ever, or that was how it seemed. Jane looked out of the front door, could see the tail lights of a car on the square, could hear voices. ‘Yeah, cheers!’ someone shouted, and a car horn beeped. Situation normal.

Jane was about to go down the steps when Moira emerged.

‘Right, Jane,’ she said briskly. ‘Let’s go, yeah?’

With no make-up, you could tell straightaway how pale she’d gone.

Jane said, ‘Oh shit. What?’

‘Jane…’ Moira pointed at the front door. ‘Out.’

‘What?’

‘Let’s keep this nice and quiet, huh? We’ll talk about it outside.’

Jane slammed the front door, shutting them in, something welling up in her chest. ‘No! I want to know. What’s happened to her?’

Moira sighed. ‘Isnae her. It’s… it’s him. I guess.’

‘Gareth?’

‘Big moustache?’

‘Yes.’ Staring at Moira, Jane moved towards the steps.

Moira pushed down the hatch and stood on it. ‘I really don’t think so. I… it’s not that I don’t think you can take it, because I’m sure you’ve seen dead people before—’

‘No!’

‘Just…’ She had her hands on Jane’s shoulders. ‘I don’t think we should touch anything.’

Jane looked back at the closed front door and pulled away from Moira, ran to another door, flung it open, saw the cold green tint on leaded glass – the room she’d been in with Gareth. Light from the hall showed that the fireplace was dead. She backed out, went to the foot of the oak stairs and shouted up, ‘Jenny!’

Leave it,’ Moira hissed. ‘For Christ’s sake, she’s beaten the guy’s head in with a bloody great iron cross and there’s blood over three walls. Now will you just open that front door and get the—’

‘Jenny…’ Jane ran up the stairs. ‘Jenny!’

Huw stood in front of his tea-chest altar, with the chalice on it and the saucer of wafers, and addressed the five of them: Ingrid, Sam, Fergus, Lol, Merrily.

‘We’re asking God to cleanse this place of evil.’ Over his head, a pale bulb burned coldly on a black flex. ‘I want us all to be quite sure what we’re about.’

Merrily said, ‘I honestly don’t see how we can be sure.’

‘Aye.’ Huw looked down at his shoes. ‘All right, I’ve an axe to grind. As Merrily knows, a woman who became a very close friend of mine lost a daughter, it were thought, to Frederick West. Donna Furlowe – found not in the garden or the cellar at Cromwell Street or under Fingerpost field or Letterbox field, but in the Forest of Dean. Was it West? Or an imitator? Or was it a person or persons who believed they had… let him in?’

Merrily saw that they’d instinctively formed a semicircle around Huw – at one end Lol, looking a little shivery in his alien sweatshirt, and pensive; at the other the lanky, dark-suited Fergus Young.

‘Look…’ Huw pushed out his hands. ‘I don’t know who killed Donna. Could very well’ve been Lynsey Davies, and one day somebody might find the finger bones that were taken away from her, and they might find them here, and then we’ll know. But until then, all we know is the source. And the source is the evil that was nurtured in West and in Rosemary West. I’m inclined to say that that were a demonic evil and may eventually have to be dealt with as such.’

‘But not yet,’ Merrily said. ‘Not until we know.’

Huw said nothing.

‘Let’s be sure about this, Huw. You’re saying that the malign, earthbound essence of West, with his beloved 25 Cromwell

Street removed from the face of the earth, was… invoked here.’ Ingrid broke the semicircle to approach Huw. ‘Can I say something?’

‘Aye, lass, let’s have a debate. We’ve got all night.’

‘Mr Owen, I told you that the people who ran the bottling plant were evasive on the phone last night about the name of the contractor. It was worrying me, so I rang them back this afternoon. Last night I spoke to the man, today I got the woman – and a rather different story. She implied that the contractor was, in fact, a relative, who did the job for cash in hand, and that was why—’

‘Did you believe her?’

‘I saw no reason not to.’

‘I can see every reason. Sergeant Mumford’d certainly heard the rumour about West working here.’

‘Huw,’ Merrily said, ‘you’ve just heard how another rumour was spread. For God’s sake, it could be apocryphal! Maybe he was never here. This psychotic woman… for all we know, she might never even have been at Cromwell Street. So many people here have just lied and lied.’

A moment’s silence.

Huw shrugged. ‘All right. How would you play it, lass?’

Merrily shook her head. It was one of those situations when this game of Deliverance, the whole of religion, seemed too full of holes and traps to be worth the candle. She looked at Huw – tired-eyed and robbed of redemption.

And then Fergus Young said, ‘Do I understand that, in the absence of a person to exorcize of this… evil, your options are limited?’

‘One way of looking at it,’ Huw said.

Fergus moved out and stood in front of the altar and took off his jacket. He was wearing a white shirt.

‘I think you’d better exorcize me, then.’ He looked at Lol. ‘I suppose he knows why.’

50 Fuse Your Dreams

‘DON’T YOU?’ The tall guy challenging Lol.

It was like being pushed out on stage all over again, except that the lighting was a little more primitive and, although everybody was staring at him, it was clear that nobody was expecting to be entertained.

Lol had been waiting for this. He could perhaps have made it happen earlier, but it had been a long night, and he’d been hoping it might have been taken out of his hands. Perhaps it had: this Fergus Young had authority. Lol had never seen him before tonight, but he recognized the aura and it had often, in his past, been around men in suits followed by lesser men in white coats. It was the aura of pseudo-sanctity.

‘It is Tracey you’ve been speaking to, I assume,’ Young said, seeking absolute confirmation.

‘Tracey?’ Lol said.

‘And she’s saying I was there.’

‘Weren’t you?’

‘She was very mixed up, that girl.’

‘I think scared to death might describe it better,’ Lol said.

I realize, Cola had said, in the car on the road to Ross, that there’s no way of concealing that it was me who told you all this, but just make sure it isn’t for nothing. You know what I mean.

So Lol was relieved that Fergus Young had raised the issue before he himself was forced into it. Like being pushed out onto the stage. Now he had to follow through.

Three of them, Cola had said. Lynsey developed this bond between these three, which was all to do with Ariconium, which had become a kind of dream place. Like Utopia. Atlantis. It was very strong. It gave them focus. ‘Fuse your dreams,’ she was saying. ‘Fuse them inside me!’

‘Ariconium,’ Lol said. ‘It became an excuse for everything you did.’

Sam Hall was shaking his head. ‘How could it be anything good, built inside lines of pylons, this cage of steel shot through with beams and rays?’

‘Oh for Christ’s sake, Sam,’ Fergus snapped, ‘do you never get beyond that drivel? Look, I want to say I’d have gone with the police – with Piers and Chris. But I guess they thought there was a chance of keeping me out of it. As the one who must be seen to have integrity. The figurehead. If I could survive this, I suppose there was a chance of pulling it together – the e-schools, the book I was writing and that Piers would publish, Ariconium… everything.’

Lol looked at Merrily: small and wide-eyed, the old duffel coat hanging open over the alb with the muddied hem. She clearly hadn’t been expecting this, but he thought the older woman seemed less shocked.

In a way, it all began with Fergus, Cola had said. He was in a sad state. It was his first school as headmaster and they were gonna close it down, and he reckoned he wasn’t well in enough to get another school, and his wife was into the status, you know? Oh, he was a real loser, Fergus, the night he showed up on Piers’s doorstep – the way people did, the way Piers encouraged them to: your bookseller’s your counsellor, shrink, priest, all rolled into one. What an ego. And Fergus would come up some nights, to get away from his wife, and drink too much. And this particular night we were there, Lynsey and me, all of us at a bit of a loose end, and Lynsey suddenly springs up, with her eyes all glittering, and she’s going ‘Let’s DO something about it…’

‘It’s like Chris said, it was incredible how she seemed to turn things around,’ Fergus said. ‘How ideas came to you that were clear winners. Came to all of us. In reality, I suppose it was just because it brought the three of us together – people who could help each other and the community coming together in that spirit of… release. Outside the rules. And when we managed to pull the school back from the brink of closure and turn it into something extraordinary, it was… suddenly it was something bigger than all of us.’

He turned to Huw Owen, who’d started to say something. Huw hadn’t taken his eyes off Fergus Young since he’d used the word exorcize.

‘I suppose you’d say there was something slightly Faustian about it and perhaps you’d be right. But we didn’t feel that at the time. It was release and not only sexual. To us, she was an extraordinary woman who seemed able to open doors one hadn’t even known were there. And look at what we achieved… look at it! Look at what we achieved for everybody!’

‘But look how it was achieved,’ Merrily said bleakly.

‘Look,’ Fergus said, ‘when we found out about her… past associations, we – I was determined to get out of it any way I could.’

I think, when they thought they were all on top of the situation and maybe they didn’t need her any more, that was when they got, you know, a little blasé, a little… Well, you didn’t ever diss that woman, Lol, not if you valued your peace of mind. What she had was hard won, and nobody was gonna… you know, nobody. So maybe that was when she started to be less circumspect. And she was involving Roddy by then, and Roddy was this real wild card. And that was when I started to try and get out of the circle, keep different company, ’cause I could see it going pear-shaped in front of my eyes. I knew what she was and where she’d been and they couldn’t see it, not for a long time. They were just too high on it all.

Huw Owen said, ‘You were here, in this chapel, after Lynsey Davies killed Melanie. With the other two.’

Yes,’ Fergus said.

‘Therefore, you were part of the cover-up.’

‘I…’ Fergus’s mouth tightened.

‘Come on, lad, if you were, sooner or later one of the others is going to spill it to the police. You think they won’t shop you, but they will. Like young Cody said, it’s a murder inquiry now.’

Fergus said, ‘We all decided to keep quiet about it, for—’

‘The good of the community,’ Huw said.

‘We were doing great things. We had an energy!’

‘Was she blackmailing you, in the end?’ Lol suggested.

‘That’s nonsense.’

Really rubbing their noses in it, Lol. Cromwell Street, the whole bit… where she’d come from, and therefore where they were coming from. What they were – by association – now part of. It must have seemed very dirty and repugnant. Maybe Piers could take a little of that, but I’m not sure about the others. I mean, Chris was a street kid, but… bloody hell. As for Fergus… a primary-school head? A man in charge of developing the minds of little children? But she knew that. I think she knew what it would do to Fergus and that’s why she was concentrating on him.

‘When we found out about her,’ Fergus was saying, ‘I’m not even going to try to tell you what that was like for me.’

Lol said, ‘But your whole future – and the future of the community – was somehow mortgaged to her now. I mean, if she did something again, if she killed somebody, and this time she got caught… it would all come out.’

Fergus shook his head. ‘Wasn’t so much her we were worried about as him – Lodge. She was going round with him, looking for… opportunities for him.’

‘Like Mrs Pawson?’ Lol said. He saw Merrily’s face twist.

‘I don’t know anything about that, but there were other instances. They were becoming totally irresponsible, the pair of them. Like delinquents. Undisciplined. They thought they were protected, invulnerable. Protected by us, in a way, because we were at the centre of the establishment – especially Chris and

me. Lodge, by this time, was becoming quite mad, and his condition was worsening – he’d be having blackouts all the time. But he didn’t realize, or he didn’t care because, in other respects, he was having the time of his life.’

‘Number One,’ Merrily said.

Lol said, ‘Satan,’ and Sam Hall looked at him. And so he gave them the explanation of this that he’d had on the phone from Mephisto Jones.

‘Sometimes, with EH, you experience dramatic temperature changes, particularly at the extremities. Hands, feet… genitals?’

‘Holy shit,’ Sam Hall said.

‘In the days of the witch-hunts, when women would be made to confess to having intercourse with the Devil, they’re supposed to have said that they could tell it was him because his penis was so cold.’

Merrily was nodding. ‘Yes, and in Roddy’s first statement to the police, he said Lynsey liked to call him Satan because he was hard and cold. And therefore… I mean, maybe she convinced him he could have… relations with any woman he wanted. Particularly if she was dead. Maybe in his dreams, I don’t—’

‘His electric dreams,’ Sam said.

‘It’s quite obscene,’ Fergus said. ‘Everything we had going here was threatened by this unstable, odious little twerp, his fantasies and his… his keeper. Yes, I’m afraid we were all immensely relieved when he killed Lynsey. Getting rid of both of them, two people who were beyond the pale, seemed like a kind of cleansing. We could move on now. And if that’s a terrible admission to make, I’m facing the truth. I’m facing my demons.’

Not really, though, are you? Lol was thinking.

And maybe Sam wasn’t fooled either. ‘I wouldn’t rule it out, Fergus, that one of you somehow got it over to Roddy that Lynsey murdered his girlfriend, Melanie. How far off the truth would I be there?’

Fergus reared up. ‘No. Certainly not. Being glad at what happened – even grateful – is one thing, but actually conspiring to make it happen? No. I couldn’t do that. You know me. You must realize how deeply, deeply sorry I am for ever becoming involved in something so ultimately obnoxious. I only ask you to believe that it began at a difficult time emotionally for me… and that I did not know the kind of psychotic individual we were dealing with. And I want to go on serving this community. Because there’s so much for me still to do – you know that. Ingrid… Sam… you know that. We mustn’t fall back.’

Lol looked at him standing there in his white shirt, the local hero, regrettably a little tarnished by an unfortunate choice of friends in adverse circumstances, but humbly seeking redemption: Here I am, baring my back for the lash.

Fergus turned to Huw. ‘I would like to take communion from you. I would like to confess. To pray for absolution. I would like you to exorcize me.’

Huw didn’t respond.

Lol felt suddenly very, very tired, and he just wanted to get this over. ‘Mr Young,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you just tell them how you killed Lynsey?’

Jane went timidly into the bedroom, the only one with a light showing under the door. On the bedside table, a small table lamp with a parchment shade was spreading a honey warmth.

The bedlinen was all white. There were magnolia rugs on the oak floorboards. A plain wooden cross hung on the white wall over the bed under oak beams stained almost black. There was an overwhelming silence in here, as thick as candle wax.

Jenny wore a long white nightdress with a high neck. She lay on her back with her hands, loosely clasping a small white prayer book, crossed over her breasts.

Her eyes were open but there was a glaze on them, a blur.

She would always be blurred.

There was a carafe of water on a bedside table and a glass and two small brown bottles with their tops off.

Designer death, Jane thought cynically, for just a moment before she began to cry quietly, going down onto her knees and touching one of the hands, which was like porcelain. And cold.

‘Don’t, Jane,’ Moira said softly. ‘Don’t touch a thing.’

‘She’s not a thing,’ Jane said.

‘No. I’m sorry.’

Jane looked up at Moira. ‘I don’t understand. She’s so cold.’

‘She’s been dead quite some time, Jane. Since long before we got here.’

‘No. She couldn’t be. We… saw her. On the square. On the cobbles. She…’

There was silence. The leaded window was grey-green and mysterious in the subtle lamplight, with just a faint reflection of the room, of Jane herself kneeling by the bed. But Jenny Box was invisible in the reflection and even in reality remained amorphous and indistinct.

‘No,’ Moira said gently. ‘We didn’t see her. You did.’

Jane’s voice rose, querulous. ‘You must’ve seen her.’

‘No.’

Jane’s voice almost vanished. ‘Oh God,’ she breathed. ‘Oh my God.’

But what if he was wrong? This had been kicking at Lol’s insides ever since he’d watched Lodge up there, edging towards inevitable death, since the night he’d lain in bed with Merrily and said, How can anybody feel sorry for a man who killed women?

That sense of Lodge as just another loser.

What’s it like? he’d asked Mephisto Jones. How long does it last?

Oh, man, complete disorientation, Mephisto said. You don’t know where you’ve been or what you’ve done. It’s not like drink, not even quite like dope. You’re well out of it, well out of it.

The final piece had dropped into place just now in the church, when the computer guy had been spilling it all to Bliss. The thing was, Lol hadn’t been able to see either of those two in the role. But this one… this one he could see.

Cola, trying to conceal the fear, had said, Just make sure it isn’t for nothing.

He looked up at the visceral hanging bulbs, so reminiscent of the dull lights in the hospital corridors of his twenties, and at the drabness of the place. Above all, he hated drabness. His own song was raging in his head now: Someone’s got to pay, now Dr Gascoigne’s on his way. He looked at Fergus and saw Dr Gascoigne whom all the nurses loved.

He took a breath. The air here smelled foul to him now.

He said to Fergus, ‘You said Roddy Lodge had blackouts more and more often. He must have had them in front of you a few times, maybe during… magical practices. Especially in this chapel – right under the pylon, right here in the middle of the hot spot. How long was he out of it, usually… five minutes, ten… longer?’

‘I never studied it,’ Fergus said distantly. ‘We tried to help him.’

Lol said, ‘Why don’t you take us through Lynsey’s last night? You were there.’

‘What are you talking about? You’re absolutely crazy,’ Fergus said. ‘Cola couldn’t—’

‘I know, Cola wasn’t there. I didn’t get this from Cola. She probably doesn’t even have an inkling…’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Fergus turned to the others. ‘What’s he talking about?’

Lol exploded. ‘Oh, you fucking do know. I get so pissed off with people like you… teachers, shrinks…’

He squeezed his eyes closed and heard Fergus saying, ‘What’s the matter with him? Is he on medication?’

Lol felt a merciful warmth, and when he opened his eyes Merrily was next to him, and she was holding his hand, pressing something hot and metallic into it, holding his hand closed over it, holding him together. He put his arm around her. He needed help. He instinctively knew the truth of it, but he couldn’t make that final leap.

‘Blackouts, huh?’ Sam Hall was rubbing his white beard. Lol remembered Sam on the night of the execution: … Shit coming off of the power lines. He’s gonna be disoriented by now. His balance’ll go completely, can’t they see that? Warning the police about what might happen. Empathizing with the man on the pylon.

‘Sam, help me,’ Lol said. ‘Roddy Lodge wasn’t a killer. He probably wasn’t a very nice man, especially in the end, but he didn’t kill this Melanie, and I really don’t think he killed Lynsey Davies, either. But when…’ He shook his head, trying to clear the fog.

Sam said, ‘You’re saying that when he came round from a blackout, resulting from heavy electrical bombardment, he might’ve thought he had. Yeah?’

‘Yeah,’ Lol breathed, and he felt the breath coming out of Merrily, too. ‘If you… I mean, if there were certain people who knew he’d often have blackouts in a certain situation…’

‘Say, like in here?’

‘They were coming more and more often, I think Mr Young just said. But if they were all ready for it – ready for the next one to happen – and there was another person among them whom they very much needed to kill…’

‘They’d wait till Roddy was out of it, and then do it.’ Sam Hall started to smile. ‘And when he came round, with the body at his feet, they’d say, “Jeez, look what you did, you crazy bastard.” ’

‘Or maybe they’d just go out and leave him to come round on his own and find it. He might not remember they’d even been here too.’

‘Are you both mad?’ Fergus Young cried, and Lol could hear the strain, the striving for effect.

‘I tell you, though,’ Sam said, ‘killing like this, by strangulation, not everyone’s capable of that. That is ultimate contact- killing. Intimate killing. I never did think Roddy Lodge could do that.’

‘But this isn’t getting us anywhere, is it?’ Huw Owen said, almost brightly. ‘This is all daft speculation.’ He looked at Fergus. ‘You meant what you said about being cleaned out, lad?’

Fergus glanced suspiciously from side to side. ‘What kind of set-up—?’ It’s entirely up to you,’ Huw said. ‘Nobody ever gets forced.’

Lol looked at Fergus – the head teacher, the golden-haired golden boy of Underhowle, the local hero, the man who wore the admiration of the community like a halo – and Fergus looked down at Huw and smiled ruefully.

‘Rather set myself up for this one, didn’t I?’ He shrugged. ‘All right. Do what you want.’

Huw shook his head regretfully. ‘Not me, lad. I’m too close to it.’ He turned, putting out an open hand in invitation. ‘Merrily?’

51 Sacrificial

HUW MOVED RAPIDLY, setting up candles on the packing case and lighting them. Sam and Ingrid stood quietly with Lol against the wall, while Fergus prowled restlessly like an actor waiting to be auditioned, going over his lines. When Merrily caught his gaze once he smiled and shook his head. It’s a farce; we both know that.

‘Minor exorcism?’ Merrily murmured to Huw. ‘You reckon?’

‘Aye, but you can’t mess about. He’s not going to sit still for the whole bit. Have to compress it a little.’

‘Is he a Christian?’

‘Ask him. No, don’t bother. You’ll find out.’

‘Huw… You tricked him.’

‘He tricked himself,’ Huw said. ‘Now put the lights out.’

Merrily took off her coat, knelt at the packing case and prayed. The cold seeped through her alb, and it felt as though her back was naked. She was aware of Huw standing behind her, as if trying to shield the fragile candle flames from an unfelt wind.

She said the Lord’s Prayer, muttered St Patrick’s Breastplate and wondered what this spontaneous, makeshift ritual, without any of the important preliminaries, could possibly achieve. Was this Huw grabbing his last chance, while Fergus was relaxed enough – or hypocritical enough – to throw himself at the mercy of a God in whom he had probably never believed?

Huw whispered, ‘Call him.’

Merrily said, ‘Fergus.’

Huw and Lol had dragged over one of the rubber mats and then folded a dust sheet and laid it on top, Lol squeezing her hand and leaving something in it.

‘Where do you want me?’ Fergus said.

‘Might be as well if you just knelt. If that’s not too uncomfortable.’

‘I try to keep myself flexible, Merrily.’

‘Good.’

Fergus knelt. She stood. She still didn’t have far to gaze down on his open, bony face, his wide-apart brown eyes. Had he? Was any of this even conceivable? She saw how long and bony his hands were, knuckles like ball—

‘If you could move a little closer to the altar.’ She wanted it so the two candles lit the upper part of his face, so that she could see his eyes.

It was always going to be the eyes.

Very quietly, Huw was removing from the bag two items: the white diary of Lynsey Davies and a small picture, the miniature in its slender frame, and he was edging silently along the dust- sheeted wall towards the entrance. He could leave this to the lass.

He had to.

Huw crept away, to be on his own. He hadn’t eaten for more than a day now. He’d awoken at five a.m. in the dark, and had spent nigh on three hours in meditation at the window. His room had faced east – she were thoughtful like that, the lass – and before the dawn came he’d established inside himself a centre of calm to which periodically, during the day, he’d returned.

His head was light now, filled with this quiet incandescence that was still linked to his spine as he padded down the body of the chapel, arriving at the side of the door. Standing there with his back to a hanging dust sheet, looking down to the altar at the opposite end of the chapel where, between the shapes of the people gathered there, he could see the candlelight, as remote from him now as starlight.

He placed the diary on the flagstones at his feet and held the miniature for a few moments in both hands. Too dark to see it, but the image was clear to him. He could see the face of Donna Furlowe sketched by her mother in pale grey pastel on white paper, so that it was like an imprint on a sheet. Or a shroud.

Huw knelt and, clasping the picture to his heart, held it there behind his hands as he put them together to pray.

With the bulbs out, there was a vague ball of light around them; Merrily could barely see anyone else.

‘Our Father…’

She said the Lord’s Prayer, the old exorcism, for the second time, slowly, and she could hear the others joining in, a grounded echo. She saw that Fergus was mouthing some of the words but not all of them, as if finding them difficult to remember. He looked briefly puzzled.

Merrily said, ‘Deliver us, merciful Lord, from all evils, past and present and to come, and grant us peace in our day. Keep us free from sin and safe from all distress…’

Fergus knelt with his heavy, proud head raised up like the prow of a Viking longboat, his eyes closed. Where was he? Where were his thoughts taking him?

Merrily floundered, sought out Huw’s shadow, couldn’t see him anywhere, but she thought she heard his whisper: ‘Confession.’

Yes, she thought, of course.

‘Almighty God, in penitence we confess that we have sinned against you, through our own fault, in thought, word and deed…’

No penitence, no regrets, course there wasn’t. He was what he was, no getting round that. He’d scratched it out on the wall of his cream-painted cell at Winson Green: Freddy the mass murderer from Gloucester.

Gloucester, not Hereford, them days was long gone. He’d picked Gloucester; made his home there, made it hisself, filled it full of hisself and what he’d took – bringing bits of Gloucester home.

Some nights he’d go back to Number 25 – not to the place it was now, look, emptied and gutted by the bloody coppers, but what it used to be, full of sweat and heat… vibrating with it.

Him too. He was strong then, at his peak, ready for anything: work hard, play hard, that was him.

Now he’d lost a lot of weight, didn’t feel too good no more. Not here in this shithole, no privacy, nothing to see, nothing to watch. Nothing to watch here but him – people looking at him all the bloody time, having a laugh, the laughs echoing across the exercise yard – ‘Build us a patio, Fred? Ho ho!’

Days fading into more days, going nowhere, never going nowhere again. Never working for hisself again, no more building things with his hands. Nothing to do with his hands no more.

No women, no more women ever. No wife. When they was in court, she wouldn’t look at him – after all he’d done for her, trying to keep her out of it, telling the coppers she didn’t know nothing. And she en’t talking to them neither. And him… he’s talked enough. All he’s got left now’s his secrets – the who and the when and the where. The how-many-times. They don’t know next to nothing, when you works it out, en’t got the half of it and that’s all right by him – Freddy the mystery man. Freddy the mass murderer from Gloucester.

And Huw stood there in the gutted chapel, and he could hear the voice well enough, but he couldn’t feel anything. No energy. All he was getting was the husk in the prison cell on New Year’s Day, 1995. The day the prison officer couldn’t get the cell door open because of what was hanging behind it from a rope made out of – versions differed – a prison blanket, or prison shirts.

This was the very worst crime to be committed against the relatives of every missing girl in Britain: allowing him to do it – letting Fred escape, with all his secrets.

Why hadn’t they – the police, the prison authorities – put the psychology together, realized just how depressed he was likely to become without the anticipation of gross and grosser sexual excesses to heat his blood? Had nobody guessed he’d become empty, a husk, insubstantial enough to hang?

Maybe they had. Maybe they just bloody had. He’d heard of coppers who’d cheered when they’d heard about the death at Winson Green. A banner going up: Nice one, Fred – something as inane as that.

And now nobody would know the who, the where, the how- many. Lynsey had written her secrets down, in the Magickal Diary, but amiable, garrulous Fred had been barely literate, and Rose was saying nowt.

Freddy, the man of mystery, and those who followed him: Lynsey and the others, the unknown others who’d lived in Cromwell Street or had just dropped in for an hour or two, and would never be identified now. Out there, with the virus inside them.

Huw stared into the darkest corner of the chapel, listening for the remains of the laughter and the sniggers, the sound of a hammer, thrown from a ladder, clanging on the flags.

He heard nothing but the drone of Merrily’s ad hoc ritual, useless in itself.

It was all useless. There was nobody watching, nothing worthy of a fight.

Huw held the pastel drawing of Donna, by Julia, close to his aching heart, thinking of all the relatives and friends and lovers of long-missing girls and women who did something like this every night. And he broke down.

At some point, Fergus’s eyes opened, and Merrily came in at once with the ritualized question, ‘What do you want from God in his Holy Church?’

Fergus, unprepared, made no reply at first. While she waited, she could hear the wind outside, coming down off Howle Hill. Sam Hall’s line came into her head: insidious wind. Where was Sam? She couldn’t see him. Where was Lol? All she could see were Fergus’s eyes, looking into hers.

‘I want,’ Fergus said, ‘what I deserve.’ He smiled at her.

Merrily felt a hollowness in her stomach. She gripped the angel pendant and felt the weight of her pectoral cross.

‘Do you renounce the Devil and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God?’

Fergus kept smiling. ‘Sure.’

‘Do you renounce all the evil powers of this world that corrupt and destroy what God has created?’

‘I… yes,’ Fergus said. ‘Of course.’

‘Do you renounce all sinful desires that draw you away from the love of God?’

When he hesitated, Merrily saw that he was looking at her breasts. Then he looked up.

‘Oh yes,’ he said.

The heat from the pendant went right up her arm. She looked into his eyes, then, and knew.

What a cliché that was: seen it in his eyes, windows of the soul – all that stuff.

In Fergus’s eyes, she saw nothing at all. A void. An absence. It was like opening the doors of a lift and finding that you were looking directly down the shaft. The absence that could now only be filled with life and energy when his hands were exploring you, when the eyes were lighting up like little torch bulbs. When he was swimming towards you through a pool of liquid lust.

Merrily knew that she was seeing what Lynsey Davies had seen, been surprised and probably delighted by, in the second before he came for her with… what?

A thin belt was the pathologist’s suggestion, according to Bliss, but no belt had ever been found. Perhaps it was Roddy’s – Fergus bending over the unconscious Roddy, as if to help him, sliding the belt out of his trousers. And then subduing Lynsey with his fists. She saw blood jetting from Lynsey’s nose and then the image cut to the belt, each end wrapped around one of Fergus’s hands and then its length pulled tight around Lynsey’s throat.

Silence soaked her head and then, over it, she heard, quite clearly and crisply:

Show you what’s what, where the bits goes, you little smart bitch…

‘Do you renounce—?’

‘Yes, of course. I renounce everything.’ Fergus smiled. ‘Is that it?’

‘That’s up to you,’ she said.

‘Oh, I’m sure that will do.’ Fergus stood up. ‘Thank you, Merrily. I imagine we all feel so much better for that.’

And he walked out of the glow and into the darkness.

‘Laughing,’ Ingrid Sollars said. ‘Laughing at us. Didn’t you feel that?’

‘I didn’t feel anything. There wasn’t anything to feel.’ Merrily turned to the altar and saw that the candles had gone out. But her eyes had long since adjusted; it seemed much lighter in here, and she could see Ingrid and Sam and Lol quite plainly. ‘Were we all expecting a confession?’

‘He’s not that dumb,’ Sam said. ‘All the people who know the truth are dead. Hell, I can see it all now. The panic Roddy musta been in – a killing he didn’t recall, a body on the floor right here. What’s he gonna do? Maybe they even advised him, Fergus and Piers – you can’t bury her here, buddy, all these excavations we’re gonna have. Must surely be someplace you’ve been working lately where you could stash her.’

‘Mmm.’

Merrily walked away, looking for Huw, whose idea this had been… and what a pointless exercise. She was disappointed in him – which she knew was wrong; he was just a man, with a burden. Perhaps what she was really avoiding was her disappointment in God, into whose hands this had been placed, in the hope of a solution. And there was none, not really. No one had been redeemed.

‘Cola French,’ Sam Hall mused. ‘I recall her now. She’d stay some weekends with Piers, I guess, came along to the village hall with him sometimes. Bright kid. But what I wondered, Lol…’ He looked around. ‘Where’d he go?’

Lol?’

Merrily could see him across the chapel, quite clearly silhouetted against a dust sheet hanging from the ceiling. Silhouetted because there was a blush on the cloth, a warm glow inside it. Lol was gathering the cloth into his arms and pulling on it.

‘What’s happening?’ Ingrid said.

When the sheet came down, with a shower of dust and plaster fragments, Merrily saw it had concealed a Gothic window that was both tall and wide and had plain glass in it, and what she saw through the glass explained why it was now so bright in here.

Cherry Lodge was wearing her old parka, and her hair was matted to her forehead. She was panting. There was a pile of old tyres beside her and she lifted one quite easily and threw it into the flames.

‘We piled some tyres all around, first,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to see him go up, did I?’

A tractor was parked at the edge of the field, not far from the end wall of the Baptist chapel. It had a trailer attached, and there were more tyres on that.

‘Left over from the foot-and-mouth pyres,’ Cherry said. ‘Railway sleepers would’ve been better but there was no time for that, see. I don’t know what’ll happen if it goes out before he’s all gone.’

The flames, with the wind under them now, lit up the pylon at the bottom of the field. When Merrily and the others had first come out of the chapel, it had looked as though the pylon itself was alight, as though the flames were filling it up inside, turning it into some metal Wicker Man of the new millennium: sacrificial fire.

It had taken Merrily a long time to work out what was happening here. Ingrid Sollars had been the first to realize, showing no shock at all. ‘Mr Lomas,’ she said drily, ‘would be most offended.’

Underneath the stench of diesel and burning rubber, Merrily detected the worst smell of all – barbecue, roast pork, Nev.

She coughed into a hand and wondered if Gomer was here, among the small but swelling crowd, the bonfire-night crowd, ‘the villagers who would never in a million years have turned out for Roddy Lodge’s funeral.

‘The police’ve sent for the fire brigade.’ Cherry Lodge was smiling, tired but triumphant. ‘Too late now. Oh, they’ll probably think of something to charge us with, but we’re only doing what they all wanted, aren’t we?’

My fault, Merrily thought. Should have made sure the church was locked.

She saw Lol coming back from the chapel, with Huw. They walked across to the other side of the fire, where there were fewer people, and Merrily was sure she saw Huw throw something grey-white into the flames. The diary?

‘After we left you, we went straight back up to the farm, we did, and piled the tyres on the trailer with the diesel,’ Cherry said. A wild exhilaration there now. ‘And we built up the pyre, and then we went back to the church and just wheeled the coffin out on Mr Lomas’s bier and loaded him on the trailer and brought him back here. Nobody noticed. The police weren’t out in force yet, just a couple down by the grave.’

‘Your idea?’ Merrily asked.

‘Bit of both. He was very bitter, Tony was, about that protest, with the banners and the placards. Lived here longer than any of them and he gets treated like dirt. Very bitter, he was. And at Roddy too, of course.’

Let him be cremated. Empty his bloody ashes in the gutter. Catharsis, Merrily thought, a hand on her pectoral cross.

And the Lodges didn’t yet know that he was probably an innocent man.

Redemption.

Really?

She looked away. In the top corner of the field, where it was separated from the land that extended behind Roddy’s bungalow… was that a woman standing alone there against the wire fence, arms folded, very still, watching Roddy burn?

Or was it just a fence post, with an old, fraying rag caught in the wire, so that it blew back in the wind, like hair?