The Smile of a Ghost

1 Into the Loop

‘NO – PLEASE – I want to understand this,’ Siân said. ‘You’re telling us that you yourself have seen one.’

Her pewter hair hung like a warlord’s helmet. She’d found her way to the head of the table, and she was sitting there in judgement. Her expression was like, Say it… say that word again.

The word that Merrily was realizing should be avoided.

‘I once had an experience, that’s the only way I can describe it,’ she said. ‘A series of experiences, if you like, that I couldn’t rationally explain.’

In the vault-like vicarage kitchen, beeswax candles burned low in their saucers, and the empty ashtray mocked her. She’d been trying to tell herself she’d guessed it was likely to turn out this bad, but the truth was, no, not in her worst dreams.

‘And so I went to the Church for advice, and the Church wasn’t exactly helpful. Felt I was being treated like some kind of hysterical loony.’

Siân’s grey eyes blinked once, like the steel shutters on the little windows of a police cell. Merrily stared into them. Sorry – I meant, like some kind of emotionally dysfunctional person with advanced learning difficulties.

‘And where exactly did you have this… series of experiences, Merrily?’

‘Here. At the vicarage. Upstairs. Just after we moved in, a couple of years ago.’

‘This is rather a big house,’ Nigel Saltash said.

‘Huge – certainly compared with anything I’d lived in before.’

‘Just you and your daughter?’

Saltash tilted his head fractionally, as though he needed this slight motion to activate his enormous brain. It also turned his smile on. He had an all-purpose smile: questioning, explaining, sympathizing, patronizing. For many years, he’d been a psychiatrist; some things didn’t change.

‘Just the two of us, yes,’ Merrily said. ‘Me and Jane. Like now.’

‘So, if I were to humbly suggest – and you could say I’m simply playing devil’s advocate, if you like – that you were feeling terribly insecure at the time… a stranger in the village, not yet fully licensed or formally installed as vicar… and you’d been thrown into this enormous, ancient, echoing… rather spooky old house…’

‘Plus, I was not that many years widowed. And we had very little money. Also like now.’

‘And have the experiences stopped now?’

In the candle-glow, Nigel Saltash’s face was taut and tanned from skiing somewhere. His light grey hair was cropped tight and fitted flush into his beard. He was long and lithe and living proof that seventy was the new fifty.

‘Yes, it was all over very quickly,’ Merrily said. ‘Once we’d got certain things sorted out.’

‘You’re playing into my rationalist’s hands, Mrs Watkins. Deliberately, perhaps?’

‘Well, I suppose I’m making the point that someone like you can turn anyone’s circumstances to your professional advantage.’

‘But am I necessarily wrong?’

Merrily shrugged. ‘I’m always going to say “I know what I saw,” and you’re always going to say “But you didn’t really see it at all.” ’

‘And that way, surely, we arrive at something approximating to the truth,’ Siân Callaghan-Clarke said.

‘Do we?’

‘Nine times out of ten, yes.’

‘Anyway,’ Merrily said, ‘that was the main reason why, when I was offered the post of exorcist – Deliverance Consultant – I would have found it hard to say no.’

‘I still cannot believe you’ve been allowed to go on for so long… alone.’ Siân was shaking her head. ‘The danger you’ve been in…’

‘Sorry?’

One of the candles sputtered out, and Merrily ran a forefinger nervously around the rim of her dog collar.

She’d been naive; she’d misread the signs.

Huw Owen had told her at the start what she’d be up against. If women priests were seen as soft plaster patching up the already crumbling walls of the Church, a woman exorcist—

Might as well just paint a great big bull’s-eye between your tits, Huw had said memorably.

A month or two ago, when the Bishop, Bernie Dunmore, had said, I’m afraid that, once again, I’ve been asked what you’re doing about establishing a Deliverance advisory panel, she’d shrugged it off.

Realizing that, OK, sooner or later there was going to have to be a support group within the diocese, but it had to involve the right people, didn’t it? People who were sympathetic, who didn’t have an agenda, political or otherwise.

Only, the ones she’d thought of as the right people hadn’t wanted to know – Simon St John, vicar of Knight’s Frome, backing away in mock terror when she’d asked him, making the sign of the cross with both hands. But the point was, she knew that he would always be there for her, like the wise old owls outside the diocese, Huw Owen and Llewellyn Jeavons. It just wasn’t official; some of these people didn’t do official.

Whereas people like Siân Callaghan-Clarke and Nigel Saltash didn’t do anything else.

Saltash was a good friend of the Dean, and giving his professional services free – no better reason for the Dean to take him to meet the Bishop and the Bishop to introduce him to Merrily. In any modern Deliverance circle, a qualified psychiatrist was now fundamental. A free one was a godsend.

Thank you, God. Thank you so much.

‘You mean I’m in spiritual danger?’ Merrily said. ‘As a woman in a male tradition?’

Now Siân was staring at her, leaning back in her chair like Merrily must be deliberately winding her up. Siân’s mother was a New Labour baroness; she wore her feminist credentials like defiant tattoos. Within five years she’d either be a bishop or out of the Church. Spiritual danger, political danger – all the same to her.

‘I meant, like, the first exorcist having been Jesus himself,’ Merrily said lamely.

She let the silence hang, recalling the reported mutterings of her predecessor, Thomas Dobbs, as he’d prowled the cathedral cloisters trying to engineer her resignation. At the time, she’d been probably the first – certainly the youngest – woman diocesan exorcist in Britain, operating under the customized title Deliverance Consultant. Appointed, it later became evident, largely because the former Bishop of Hereford had wanted to get into her cassock. Siân Callaghan-Clarke, already a well-placed minister in the diocese, would have heard the rumours and stored them away.

Payback time for bimbo priest?

Martin Longbeach carefully relit the candle with a taper. Martin, tubby and camp, wore an alb and an outsize pectoral cross and was known to covet the south Herefordshire parish of Hoarwithy because of its exotic Italianate church. It had been his idea that they should light candles tonight, to ‘aid concentration’.

‘By danger,’ Siân said, ‘I meant the danger of being compromised and exploited… and of having to make instant decisions that you’re perhaps not…’

… qualified to make, experienced enough to handle.

Siân left this unsaid. Merrily sat in the candlelight, images of the past couple of years encircling her like pale smoke – fears, anxieties, faltering hopes, tentative joys. And also the most bewildering and stimulating years of her life.

There was a stillness in the air. Was this it? Intimations of the end, on a cool April night?

Siân Callaghan-Clarke clasped her long hands and leaned over them across the table.

‘Tonight we’ve tried to go over what we understand by the term “Deliverance”, and the multiplicity of conditions we’re expected to examine – from perceived ghosts and poltergeists, to perceived curses, possession and so-called psychic attack. We’ve considered the cases Merrily has to deal with, day to day: the deluded, the disturbed, the fantastical, the pathological liars—’

‘Not forgetting those in need of prayer and non-judgemental understanding. And the ones afflicted by what seemed to be genuine… intrusion,’ Merrily said.

‘Seemed to be.’ Nigel Saltash smiled.

‘Seemed to me to be. A conclusion not lightly reached.’

‘The point is,’ Siân said, ‘that deciding who is deluded and who – however remote that possibility might be – is, ahm, genuinely afflicted… has been Merrily’s sole responsibility. An impossible situation for just one person, who also has a parish to run.’

‘I’ve not been without back-up. Huw Owen’s always on the end of a phone.’

Merrily felt the outline of the unopened packet of Silk Cut in a pocket of her denim skirt. The other back-up.

‘Ah yes,’ Siân said, looking over her half-glasses. ‘Huw Owen.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Saltash said. ‘Who is Huw Owen?’

‘Nigel, I’m not sure you’ll want to know.’

Siân’s eyes were still and neutral. Merrily was furious but bit down on it. She really, really needed a cigarette. They were all looking at her.

‘Huw was my primary tutor. Me and a bunch of others. He runs training courses for the Deliverance Ministry in a former Nonconformist chapel in a remote part of the Brecon Beacons.’

‘Where nobody can hear you scream,’ Siân said. ‘My understanding is that Huw Owen, while living the life of a fourth-century hermit, has himself been in such a precarious psychiatric state for so long that—’

Merrily felt herself arch like a cat. ‘That’s ridic—’

‘—that not only can he no longer be relied upon to remain au fait with current thinking—’

‘And fucking defamatory!’ Merrily said.

In the silence, the phone rang in the scullery, which she used as her office.

Siân looked up, said mildly. ‘You want to get that?’

‘I’ll… let the machine take it.’ Merrily glanced at the scullery door, which was ajar. ‘If it’s not urgent…’

They all sat there uncomfortably as the machine in the office played Merrily’s outgoing message through the open door, Nigel Saltash giving her a look that was professionally wry and sympathetic.

It was Saltash who’d introduced Siân, who’d worked with him when she was standing in as a hospital chaplain. She said she’d been wary of Deliverance work up to now, but if Nigel was going to be involved…

Siân, in turn, had brought in Martin Longbeach, once her curate, who was clearly a placid and malleable guy. And, no doubt, guaranteed not to fancy Merrily.

This was a nightmare.

There was a bleep from the answering machine and a cough.

‘Mrs Watkins. Mumford. Andy Mumford. I’ll… call you later, if that’s all right with you.’

The line went dead, the machine rewound, Merrily nodded.

‘I can call him back.’

‘Would that have been Sergeant Mumford?’ Siân asked. ‘From Hereford CID?’

‘I think he’s about to retire, actually. May already have…’

‘You’ve had some interesting dealings with the police, haven’t you? I was talking the other day to Sergeant Mumford’s superior – DCI Howe?’

‘Oh? Yeah, our paths have… crossed.’

‘So she tells me. I get on very well with her.’

Figured. If glacial Annie had opted for the Church rather than a fast-track police career, Canon Callaghan-Clarke would have been her ideal spiritual director.

‘I’ll make some more tea,’ Merrily said. Nobody had referred again to Huw Owen. Nobody had reacted to her outburst.

‘No, I think we should say goodnight at this point.’ Siân folded her document case, took off her glasses. ‘Given ourselves quite a lot to consider.’

‘Yes.’

‘I think we’ve all accepted that, having inherited a basically medieval structure, our task is to turn it into something practical, efficient and geared to the demands of the twenty-first century. To formulate a set of parameters, so that changes in, say, personnel will not damage the efficacy of the essential Deliverance module.’

Merrily gripped the cigarette packet on her thigh. Deliverance module?

Siân stood up.

‘I think the main decision we’ve made is that, to ease the very obvious pressure on Merrily, all of us should immediately be brought into the loop – the Deliverance e-mail loop, that is. And that each and every new case should be submitted for observations before any action is taken. Correct?’

‘It makes sense,’ Martin Longbeach said. ‘We might not always be able to make a contribution, but it’s a question of sharing.’

‘I’ll… tell Sophie at the Bishop’s office,’ Merrily said.

‘And in my case,’ Nigel Saltash said, ‘in these formative days, I do think it might be rather a good idea for me to tag along and observe some of the people you’re dealing with, Merrily. I mean, purely from an educational point of view?’

‘Sorry?’

‘I want to learn. See how you operate. Had more time on my hands since we sold half the land. Always thought I could settle down, in retirement, as a farmer, but I’m afraid that once a shrink… Would that be in order? I want to understand how you see Deliverance.’

Merrily took a big breath. ‘Nigel, how I see Deliverance… I’m supposed to be a priest, right? I have to operate on the basis of there being a spiritual element – that we’ve got used to calling God – in everything. So I actually believe that things can happen on more than one level.’

‘Indeed,’ Martin Longbeach said. ‘The holistic approach is essential. All aspects of life are interconnected.’

‘And the fact that there are certain things that I’m never going to be able to explain scientifically or psychologically… that doesn’t bother me one way or the other. And I think we should be there to say to the people affected: no, you’re not necessarily going mad—’

‘But if you are’ – Nigel Saltash smiled hugely – ‘we can also help you with that.’

Merrily sighed. ‘As I tried to say, when I was having problems the Church looked at me sideways and raised its eyebrows pityingly. I don’t want anybody out there to feel I’m writing them off as disturbed or deluded.’

‘And I’d absolutely hate to cramp your style, Merrily,’ Saltash said.

Merrily stood up. Her legs felt weak.

‘We’ll see what we can work out.’

‘Of course we will,’ Saltash said.

Dear God.

2 Vice-rage

LOL HAD A bunch of new-home cards. He’d put them in the deep sill of the window overlooking the bathroom-sized garden and the orchard beyond. Jane began to read them, holding the first one up to the hurricane lamp hanging from the central beam.

‘Alison, eh? Wooooh!’

The card had a pencil sketch of horses on the front. Alison Kinnersley, who bred them, had lived with Lol for a while before taking up with James Bull-Davies, whose family had once run this village before they ran out of money. Two years ago, even a struggling squire with holes in his farmhouse roof had been a better bargain than Lol.

But now Lol had Mum and a career back on course, and the village more than accepted him, and even Alison was being generous.

It’s definitely the right thing to do, she’d written. You can’t hide it for ever. Even James thinks that now, and I don’t need to tell you how conservative James is.

‘Wow,’ Jane said, ‘if it goes on like this, they’ll be inviting you to run for the Parish Council.’

Lol looked down from the stepladder, the overloaded paint-roller in his hand dribbling burnt orange onto the flagstones. Jane had chosen the ceiling colour; it looked wrong now, but she was never going to admit that. Lol just looked uncomfortable. He had orange smudges down the front of his Gomer Parry Plant Hire sweatshirt, tiny spots on his round, brass-rimmed glasses.

‘Then again,’ Jane said, ‘maybe not.’

There was a card from the Prossers at the Eight till Late and one from Gomer Parry and Danny Thomas – Welcome back, boy – with a sheep on the front driving a JCB.

Finally, one from Alice Meek. God bless you in your new home, Mr Robinson. Big letters full of stroke victim’s shake. Alice was only alive because of Lol, and the village knew it, and that was why he was so welcome here now.

And, of course, it was making him wary. Lol didn’t wear medals. Finding the old girl half-frozen over a grave in the churchyard, carrying her into the vicarage, and all the heavy stuff that had happened afterwards… he didn’t even like to talk about any of that. It could easily have ended so differently.

The verdict at the inquest on the guy who’d wanted Alice dead had been Accidental Death – totally correct – although most of what had happened had not come out, the villagers closing ranks around Lol. No longer an outsider, even if it wasn’t publicly acknowledged that he was Mum’s… whatever.

Couldn’t have worked out better, really. His first album in many years was out, he had respectable gigs scheduled. And he was about to abandon his temporary flat at Prof Levin’s recording studio at Knight’s Frome – like, thirty miles away – for this little terraced house a one-minute stroll from the vicarage. So, like, if his star, for once, was accelerating towards the high point of the heavens… well, nobody could say it had been easy.

Jane looked up at him. It was getting too dark to paint, and the electricity was still disconnected, but he was going at it like, if he stopped, somebody would come and take the house away and maybe take Mum, too… and then the tour would be cancelled and the album would be savaged in the Guardian or Time Out, and…

‘Come on down, Lol. Tomorrow is another day.’

‘Need to finish this corner.’

‘You can’t even see the corner. Let’s go and get some chips, otherwise I won’t get to eat till breakfast. If Mum gets through with the po-faced gits on the Deliverance Committee before eleven, it’ll be a certifiable miracle.’

‘Hate going in the chippie now,’ Lol said. ‘They won’t let me pay.’

Jane laughed.

‘It’s not funny, Jane.’

‘Lol, they like you. That’s—’

‘Unsettling.’

Jane sighed. ‘When’s the next gig?’

‘Next Thursday. Bristol.’

‘Wooh, bigger and bigger. Glastonbury next year?’

‘Jane, you trying to make me fall off?’

Oh God, Nick Drake Syndrome; it never really goes away.

‘Bad enough that there’s this guy from Q magazine coming to interview me on Saturday,’ Lol said. ‘I mean, if I’d thought—’

‘What?’ Jane went to the foot of the ladder, shouting up like he was on a mountain. ‘Did you actually say… Q magazine? Like, did I hear that correctly? And did you say, “That’s bad enough”? And are you insane?’

‘Just there are things I don’t necessarily want people to read about.’

‘So like’ – Jane spread her hands wide in frustration – ‘don’t talk about them! Talk about any old crap. Lie. They won’t care, they’re a music mag. When will it be in?’

‘Dunno. It’s a monthly. Guy said they work weeks in advance. Maybe it won’t be in at all. They probably do a lot of interviews that get overtaken by better stuff.’

‘This diffidence is worrying.’ Jane shook her head. ‘I think I preferred the paranoia.’ She went to put Alice’s card back on the window sill, and found another one lying face down. ‘What’s this, Lol?’

Actually, this one wasn’t a card, as such: it was a folded paper, lined, like from a writing pad. She opened it out and held it up to the lamp, saw crude line drawings done in thick fibre-tip, of a big house and a little house with two parallel lines between them, suggesting a road. Across the big house was scrawled:

VICERAGE

Jane looked up at Lol. ‘Vice-rage?’

‘Vicarage.’ Lol started rolling hard at the ceiling. ‘Could be a double meaning there, I suppose, but I wouldn’t think whoever sent it was that smart.’

There was a double-pointed arrow connecting the two houses across the road. Underneath the drawing was written:

RECKON YOU CAN FIND YOUR WAY IN THE DARK?

‘Bloody hell,’ Jane said. ‘It’s a poison-pen letter.’

She looked up the ladder. Lol went on painting.

Jane smiled thinly. So this was the problem.

Well, there was always going to be one spiteful bastard, somewhere. Mum got along with most people in Ledwardine, but not everybody approved yet of women priests. And it was a safe bet that not everybody who did approve would accept the idea of the female clergy having intimate relationships unsanctified by marriage – like the clergy was supposed to stay in the Victorian era, Mum and Lol walking out together, with a chaperone.

This would be one of the areas of his life that Lol would prefer to be kept out of Q magazine.

‘Who sent it?’

‘I don’t think that’s supposed to be obvious, Jane. That’s possibly why it isn’t signed.’

‘But there’s an element of threat. I mean, I realize it’s probably just some semi-literate tosser…’

Lol came down from the stepladder, ducking under the beam that divided the room. The beam was dark brown oak, well woodwormed – a big chocolate flake. The hurricane lamp swayed, shadows rolled. Jane wanted to crumple up the paper, but on the other hand…

‘Can I keep it?’

‘What for?’

‘Might be an opportunity to compare the writing. Like with the parish noticeboard? The cards in the shop window? Or even the prayer board in the church. I mean, it’s always useful to know who your friends aren’t. Anyway’ – she folded the paper – ‘nothing really to worry about. I don’t think Mum’s worried. I mean, the Bishop knows.’

Jane picked up a paint rag and dabbed up some blotches from the flagged floor, recalling the first time she’d seen Lol, when he was looking after Lucy Devenish’s old shop, Ledwardine Lore. Lol peering out between racks of apple-shaped candles in the orchard-scented air. Like a mouse. He’d been really messed up back then.

Jane had been fifteen, just a kid. Now she was facing A levels and a driving test, and she wasn’t a virgin, and Lol and Mum were some kind of tentative, nervous item.

And Lucy Devenish was dead.

Hard to accept that, even now. No matter what colours the crooked walls and sloping ceilings were repainted, this was Lucy’s house and always would be. When you stood in the hall you could imagine you still saw her old poncho hanging over the post at the foot of the stairs. If it was really dark when you came in, you could imagine Lucy herself there, wearing the poncho, her arms lifting it like batwings.

The people from London who’d agreed to buy the house when it first came on the market last year had given back word after their five-year-old asthmatic kid had asked who the old woman was on the landing.

Scary. Lucy hadn’t been scary, not really. Formidable, certainly. Maybe a little witchy, in the best, most traditional sense, and…

… OK, she had been a little scary. But she’d liked Lol and supported him when he needed it, and she’d been some kind of mentor to Jane, and…

… And this was OK. Lol finally getting the house – this was meant. Everything finally was going to be OK for Lol and for Mum, who’d been a widow for long enough. Yeah, in one way it was ridiculous, Lol living in this little house and Mum across the road in the huge vicarage, with seven bedrooms, but it was an arrangement that would work, for the time being.

And it would have Lucy’s blessing. Lucy who, though dead, still somehow spoke for Ledwardine.

Jane allowed herself a shiver. Lol carried the roller and paint tray into the kitchen and put them in the sink.

‘How about you get the chips?’

‘Lol, you wimp.’

‘Wallet’s on the mantelpiece.’

Jane found it and took out a tenner.

‘Mushy peas?’

‘Why not? Just don’t say they’re for me.’

Jane shoved the tenner down a back pocket of her jeans, along with the vice-rage note, and shrugged on her fleece.

‘You’ll be all right on your own for a few minutes, then? You and Lucy?’

Lol said, ‘Sometimes – did I tell you? – sometimes I try out a new song on her. If she likes it, she joins in. A bit croaky and out of tune, of course, but you can’t—’

Jane threw the paint rag at him.

3 Pebbles

NEXT MORNING, WHEN Jane had left for school, Merrily phoned Huw Owen. She hadn’t slept well, was feeling frayed and edgy, sitting in the scullery in the kid’s old pink fleece. Outside the window, the day was crazed with April chemistry: white sunlight soaking through holes in the foaming cloud.

‘So when did this happen, lass?’

Huw had been up north on what he liked to call a retreat, working with a gang of hard-nosed clerics in the badlands of south Manchester. She wasn’t yet ready to hear his horror stories.

‘Think it happened when I wasn’t looking. Can’t say you didn’t warn me – if you don’t pick a team, somebody picks one for you. Just that my guys didn’t want to be picked.’

He was silent. She could hear the kindling detonating his living-room fire. Pictured his feet in peeling trainers on the hearth, the volatile sunlight in his old hippy’s shaggy hair. She was getting the feeling that his Manchester time had left him energized rather than wearied.

Precarious psychiatric state. Bitch.

‘I feel pathetic,’ she said, ‘ringing you with this stuff. I just wondered if you’d – you know – heard anything.’

Huw had been born in rural Wales but brought up in Yorkshire, returning to the Beacons in middle age as a parish priest and a personal trainer in the practice of exorcism. Where nobody can hear you scream. Merrily heard the creak of his chair as he stretched, thinking.

‘Callaghan-Clarke. Wasn’t she one of the bints who did a circle-dance round the tombs of the old bishops in Hereford Cathedral to celebrate the ordination of women?’

‘If she was, she’s calmed down now.’

‘The calming power of naked ambition. Get their feet under the table, next thing they want’s a bigger table. Where exactly does she stand in your… Deliverance circle?’

‘Given herself a title: Diocesan Deliverance Coordinator. We voted on it. Every case we get from now on has to be submitted to the group before any action’s taken. We voted on that, too. Three in favour, one bemused abstention.’

‘Bugger,’ Huw said.

‘Quite.’

‘A little focus group. It’s just what you need, isn’t it?’

‘We light candles and concentrate. I’m not kidding.’

She told him about Martin Longbeach, and Huw laughed – the noise milk would make if you could hear it curdling.

Merrily looked up at the wall clock: nearly nine a.m., and a difficult funeral to organize – an elderly woman who’d moved to the village no more than a fortnight ago to live with her daughter and son-in-law, themselves comparative newcomers. And Andy Mumford was due here around ten. It was looking like another day when she wouldn’t see much of Lol.

‘Back-up’s one thing,’ Huw said. ‘You need a witness sometimes, no question, and somebody to watch your back. But an ill-matched committee operating in an area where nothing, at the best of times, is ever a bloody certainty…’

‘We all accept the need for a psychiatrist…’

‘There are good shrinks,’ Huw said, ‘and there are dangerous shrinks.’

‘You come across Nigel Saltash before?’

‘Never.’

‘Me neither.’ Merrily gazed out of the window at the unmown lawn, vividly green against the grey sky with its seeping sun. ‘He’s a regular churchgoer, however.’

Huw laughed again. ‘You know your problem, lass? Had your picture in the papers once too often, and you take a very nice picture. They don’t like that. And they weren’t happy at all when you were cosying up to the pagans against Ellis.’

‘Oh, Huw, Ellis was the kind of humourless, dangerous, fundamentalist bigot who brings the Church into—’

‘Ellis was part of the Church,’ Huw said. ‘Whereas pagans are pagans. Any road, I’m just planting the thought.’

‘Who doesn’t like it? Not the Bishop?’

‘Dunmore’s a time-server. He wouldn’t even be consulted. Think higher.’

‘Huh?’ She was thrown.

‘You want a list of all the embittered, back-stabbing bastards who hate the whole concept of Deliverance? Hey, God forbid that priests should meddle in metaphysics. Somebody’s happen saying, we need to keep an eye on that little Watkins in Hereford… could be getting carried away… too much, too soon. Needs a steadying hand…’

‘Hang on. Let me get this right. You think Callaghan-Clarke may have been nudged into place as a… an instrument of restraint?’

Merrily heard Huw sniff. She was thinking of what Siân had said about his precarious psychiatric state. Would it help to tell him about that? She stared out into the garden, at the pale buds on the apple trees.

‘And the bottom line,’ she said, ‘is that nothing much gets done, right?’

‘ “But how can we be certain?” ’ Huw doing this delicate, disapproving, posh voice. ‘ “We could so easily look ridiculous, couldn’t we?” And this lad with the candles sounds like window dressing. Bumbling New Ager. Whimsical, but essentially nice and harmless.’

‘Making us seem a little woolly?’

‘That’s a good word, aye.’

‘Let me get this right. You actually think—?’

‘Leave it with me,’ Huw said. ‘I’ll ask around, see what I can find out.’

Merrily made a call about the funeral. Hereford Crem: two p.m., Monday. She’d go and see the family over the weekend. It was always a problem when you didn’t know either the dead person or the bereaved: gently quizzing them about their mum, looking for the one little jewelled detail that would make it meaningful before you slid her through the curtains and the next one came through – another priest, another set of mourners. A line of sad trains on the last platform.

Andy Mumford turned up ten minutes early.

On the phone last night he’d sounded agitated. When he walked in, she was shocked.

He was wearing a fawn-coloured zipper jacket over a yellow polo shirt. She’d never seen him without a suit before, and he looked all wrong. He’d always seemed comfortably plump; now he was sagging and his farmer’s face was less ruddy than red.

‘You had breakfast, Andy? I can do toast—’

‘No, no…’ He waved a hand, said he’d have tea. Weak. No sugar.

So she’d been right: he’d retired from the police.

‘When?’

‘Three weeks back.’ Mumford pulled a chair from under the pine refectory table. ‘Three weeks and two days. CID boys bought me a digital camera.’

‘Oh.’

‘Now I’ll have to get a computer.’ He sat down with his legs apart, hands bunched together between his knees. ‘Like having your leg off.’

‘Sorry…?’

‘People thought I was looking forward to it. Like you look forward to having your leg off. Wake up in the morning and you think it’s still there, and then you realize.’

It was why his clothes didn’t fit; he’d lost the kind of weight you could never quite put back. Poor Andy. She’d seen a lot of him over the past two years, most recently as bag-carrier to Frannie Bliss, the DI. Bag-carrier and local encyclopaedia: an essential role.

‘You’ll get another job?’ Merrily filled the kettle. ‘Security adviser somewhere, or…?’

‘To be honest, Mrs Watkins, I’d rather not be a night-watchman at some battery-chicken plant.’ Mumford looked down at his hands. ‘Might get some chickens of my own, mind. Beehives. Dunno yet. However—’ He looked up at her. ‘How’re you?’

‘I’m all right.’

She smiled. Along the Welsh Border it was some kind of etiquette that you took ten or fifteen minutes to get around to what you’d come about. You tossed pebbles into the pond and, at some stage, the issue would float quietly to the surface. Must have been fascinating to listen to Mumford interrogating a suspect.

‘Your mother don’t live round yere, Mrs Watkins?’

‘Cheltenham. She has a lot of friends there now. We don’t see each other that often.’

‘But you did have some relations yereabouts?’

‘My grandad had a farm and an orchard near Mansell Lacy when I was a kid. All gone now.’

Mumford nodded. ‘My folks moved north into south Shropshire, after my dad retired from the Force. Ludlow. They had a little newsagent’s and sweetshop for a while, then it got too much for them.’

‘Nice place. Historic.’

‘Pretty historic themselves, now, my mam and dad. They’ll expect me to do more for them, now I’m retired.’

‘No brothers… sisters?’

‘Sister. Twelve years younger than me, lives in Hereford with this low-life idle bugger. Her…’ He paused. ‘Her boy, from when she was married, he never got on with this bloke. Always an oddball kid. Used to spend the school holidays with his grandparents. In Ludlow.’

He looked at Merrily, and she met his baggy-eyed gaze and detected ripples in the pond, a circular movement, something coming up.

Mumford said, ‘My sister’s boy, my nephew – Robson Walsh.’

The name broke surface, lay there, the water bubbling around it. Robson Walsh.

‘Suppose you’d still be… dealing with the funny stuff, Mrs Watkins?’ Mumford’s face was a foxier shade of red now, but she saw that his eyes looked anxious.

‘When it comes up.’

She sat down opposite him. Never the most religious of professions, the police. Saw too much injustice, degradation, few signs of divine light. Even Frannie Bliss, raised a Catholic up in Liverpool, had once said that if he ever made it to heaven he wouldn’t be too surprised to see a feller with a trident and a forked tail sitting on a cloud and laughing himself sick.

Whatever this was, it was hard for Mumford.

Robson Walsh. Robbie Walsh, Robbie Walsh…

‘Oh my God, Andy.’ TV pictures: old mellow walls, police tape. A school photograph. ‘The boy who fell—’

‘From Ludlow Castle, aye. I was there.’

‘At the castle?’

‘In the town. Come to pick up the wife – she was working at Ludlow Hospital. We were going out for dinner, celebrate my… celebrate…’ He looked down at the table. ‘Station sergeant at Ludlow spotted me in the street, took me into the castle. Boy’s still lying there, waiting for the pathologist.’

‘God, I’m so sorry, Andy, I just never—’

‘I’ve spent time with a lot of families lost a child.’ He looked up at her. ‘But at the end of it, Mrs Watkins, you always gets to go home.’

‘You said your sister’s son?’

‘Slag.’

‘Oh.’

‘Lives in Hereford with a new bloke – toe-rag. Only too happy to let the boy spend his holidays at his gran’s. Now she blames me.’

‘Your sister? Why?’

‘’Cause we covered up, Robbie and me, covered up how bad the ole girl was getting. He couldn’t stand the thought that he wouldn’t be able to go and stay there. He loved it, see. Ludlow. The history.’

‘They called him The History Boy – in one of the papers.’

‘That’s right.’

‘You and he covered up that your mother was…?’

There was a knocking from the front door, where the bell had packed in again. Merrily didn’t move.

‘What’s the point of putting a long name to it?’ Mumford said. ‘But her mind’s going, and it en’t no better for this.’

‘But didn’t your sister know what your mother was like?’

‘They don’t speak. Not since she went off with the toe-rag. I usually got to take the boy to Ludlow. Hell, he was all right there. Better than at home on the bloody Plascarreg, with a latchkey.’

‘Your sister lives on the Plascarreg?’

Not the best address in Hereford.

‘He was capable and intelligent,’ Mumford said. ‘I never had a son, but I couldn’t’ve complained if I’d got one like him. Anyway, Gail works at Ludlow Hospital three days a week, so she pops in, sees they’re all right.’

‘What about your father?’

‘Not the most sympathetic of men. Tells you about all the death he’s seen in his time, how you gotter put it behind you kind of thing. Meanwhile, ole girl goes over and over it in her mind, what’s left of it.’ Mumford glanced over at the door to the hall – more knocking. ‘You better get that.’

‘It’s OK.’

Probably just the postman with a parcel. He’d leave it in the porch.

Robbie Walsh. She recalled the case throwing up questions in the papers. How had he managed to conceal himself in the castle? Had he been alone?

‘So has the inquest…?’

‘Opened and adjourned after medical evidence. Boy was cremated at Hereford. No proof of anything more than an accident. Most popular theory is he got totally absorbed in whatever he was checking out inside the castle, got hisself locked in and went up the tower to try and signal for help. Mabbe leaned over too far.’

‘That feasible?’

‘It’s feasible. But there’s ways out of there for an agile kid, and if anybody knew ’em he would. But… nothing iffy sitting on a plate, the police don’t go looking for it no more. Not enough manpower to handle what they got on the books already. Verdict of misadventure, most likely.’

‘And what do you think?’

‘I reckon it should be an open verdict. Mabbe I’m just saying this on account of it’s destroyed what was left of my bloody family, but I reckon there’s stuff we don’t know. Meanwhile, my mam… this is gonner be hanging over her for the rest of… whatever she’s got left.’

There was more knocking at the front door, insistent.

‘In more ways than one, it looks like,’ Mumford said.

‘Sorry?’

‘Hanging over her. It’s why I’ve come. You better get that this time, it en’t gonner stop.’

Merrily went to open the door.

Just what she needed.

‘Sorry if I got you out of the bath or something, Merrily.’

Nigel Saltash smiling his all-purpose smile.

4 Routine Pastoral

ON HIS TRAINING courses at the disused chapel in the Beacons, Huw Owen liked to invent pet names for the unquiet dead.

Insomniac, hitch-hiker, breather, groper…

Exorcist jargon, a touch of black humour for the troops.

Merrily brought over an extra mug, poured three teas and sat down at the head of the table, her back to the window. The sun laid a creamy sheen, like an altar cloth, on the pine table top.

Huw would have called Mumford’s mother’s problem a parting-caller or a day tripper. Throwaway terms for a commonplace phenomenon – loved ones dropping in just to show their faces, let you know they wouldn’t be far away. They tended not to stay long. She remembered Huw saying that, nine times out of ten, they were none of his business.

‘The technical term is “bereavement apparition”,’ she told Mumford. ‘If anybody bothered to do a survey, they’d probably find that at least fifty per cent of bereaved people have similar experiences.’

Usually widows or widowers, or the children or siblings of someone who had recently died. But it could equally be a favourite teacher or a long-time colleague. You’d be doing something mundane around the house when suddenly you’d feel a sharp awareness of whoever had died. Or you’d actually see them passing through the hall or maybe sitting in a favourite chair. Just a glimpse, and then they’d be gone.

‘What we’re saying, Andrew,’ Nigel Saltash said, ‘is that this tends to happen with a person one is used to having around. It’s something I’ve encountered many, many times.’

He was wearing a tracksuit the colour of his hair, and his tanned skin shone. At the door just now, on auto-smile, he’d told Merrily he’d thought they ought to have a chat one-to-one. Didn’t want her, after last night, to run away with the wrong idea. And as this was his day for early-morning jogging with Kent Asprey, the fitness-freak Ledwardine GP… Oh yes, old mates. Hammered the country lanes together every Friday.

Terrific.

So there’d been no alternative to bringing him in and explaining to Mumford about the new Deliverance Advisory Group – giving Mumford an opportunity to say nothing, make an excuse and leave, call her later.

But, of course, it turned out that he and Saltash knew each other from way back, when Saltash had worked at the Stonebow Psychiatric Unit in Hereford. Reminding Mumford of all the times he’d been called across to Police Headquarters to assess some drugged-up prisoner self-harming in the cells. What days, eh? And now both of them retired. Or entering a new life-phase, as it were.

Saltash watched, with a smile conveying mild pain, as Mumford dumped three white sugars in his mug of tea.

‘Essentially, what you’re looking at, Andrew, is grief-projection. The bereaved person is carrying an image of the departed one very close, as it were, to his or her heart. We don’t want to have seen the last of them. A part of us desperately wants them still to be around, in the old familiar places. And so an area of our consciousness responds to the need. This is almost certainly what’s happening with your mother and her visions of the boy. Are we together on this one, Merrily, would you say?’

The tilted head. The smile that was a well-oiled explanatory tool.

But he was probably right. Huw Owen’s advice had always been to leave parting-callers, in general, alone. Didn’t matter whether they were hallucinations or psychological projections or something less explicable, they usually brought comfort rather than fear or distress, and so they were part of the healing mechanism, part of a phase that would pass. And if Mrs Mumford’s mind was on the slide…

‘Can I…?’ Merrily conspicuously sugared her own tea and stirred it noisily. ‘Can I just briefly go over some of it again, Andy? Your mother says she… saw him, first, in the kitchen, right?’

Mumford nodded, glanced at Nigel Saltash, then glanced away.

‘Out of the corner of an eye. Said he was standing by the fridge, like he was about to help himself to a can of pop. When she turned towards him, he… vanished. This was before the funeral.’

Nigel Saltash was nodding eagerly. Merrily wondered, despondent, if he was going to call in every week after jogging with Dr Asprey, to discuss the many areas where so-called spiritual guidance overlapped with nuts-and-bolts psychiatry.

‘And the second time?’ she said to Mumford.

‘In the back garden. Robbie’s standing by the bird bath, looking up at the house. Mam was in the bedroom, says she saw him through the window. But it was… you know, it was like a reflection in the glass. When she stepped back he wasn’t there any more.’

‘A reflection,’ Saltash said. ‘Yes, of course.’

‘Same in the town.’ Mumford was mumbling now, like he wanted to get this over. ‘Near the Buttermarket. Shop window.’

‘Oh, really? Another reflection?’

‘Kind of thing. She was with my dad. He didn’t see anything. She was looking in the window and Robbie, he was behind her, but when she turned round…’

Merrily said, ‘Did she think he knew she was there?’

‘I don’t… I don’t know.’

‘I mean, does she ever think he wants to communicate with her?’

Mumford shook his head. ‘Don’t know.’

‘Does it frighten her at all?’

‘Frighten her?’ The corner of Mumford’s mouth twitched. ‘Robbie?’

‘Right.’

‘I see what you’re getting at, Merrily,’ Nigel Saltash said. ‘There’s clearly a contributory element of perceived guilt here – whether or not that guilt is misplaced. And also’ – he leaned across the table, holding his hands like bookends – ‘a desperate need to know exactly what happened.’

‘Does she know you were coming here, Andy?’ Merrily said.

‘I…’ Mumford shook his head. ‘She don’t like a fuss. Like she was very embarrassed at the size of turnout for the funeral – people from the castle, councillors, the Press. Like they were sitting in judgement, she thought. But all it was… it’s still a small town, see. They take something like this to heart. Bishop insisted on conducting the funeral hisself—’

‘David Cook?’

The Suffragan Bishop of Ludlow. Number two in the Hereford diocese. Bernie Dunmore, now Bishop of Hereford, had previously held the post. But surely David Cook…

‘—Even though it was only about a week before he went in for his heart bypass,’ Mumford said. ‘Not a well man, and he looked it.’

Mumford didn’t look a well man, either. His hair was grey and lank, his eyes baggy and wary, small veins wriggling in his cheeks. He had to be about twenty years younger than Nigel Saltash, but he seemed older. Just a civilian now – no longer Detective Sergeant, while Saltash was still Dr Saltash.

‘Look, I…’ Mumford came to his feet. ‘Might well be like you say, Mrs Watkins, imagination playing tricks.’

‘Well, that wasn’t necessarily what I—’

‘Old girl’s had a shock. She don’t want no fuss, neither do I. I just thought, as I knew you… You’ve cleared things up a bit. That’s fine. And the doc here…’

‘Glad to help an old mate, Andrew.’ Nigel Saltash sitting back, with his arms folded. Like when the driving-test examiner had told you to park and sat there making notes on his clipboard.

Merrily said on impulse, ‘I think I should probably talk to her.’ She saw Saltash raising an eyebrow. ‘So, if you want to ask her, Andy…’

‘You think you could, ah, get rid of it, Merrily?’ Saltash’s smile expressing professional curiosity.

‘Wrong terminology, Nigel.’

‘Ah, sorry. Help it on its way?’

‘Even that might be counter-productive.’

‘So you have this general policy of non-intervention, unless there’s a clear threat to the patient’s mental health.’

Patient. God.

‘Something like that,’ Merrily said.

She hated this. She hated it when lofty consultants exchanged viewpoints at the foot of the bed, like the third party was already brain-dead.

‘I have a lot to learn, don’t I?’ Saltash said. ‘On which basis, if you go to see this lady, might I perhaps tag along?’

She could see Mumford was uncomfortable about this. Saltash evidently picked up on it, too, smiling down at him.

‘Andrew, old boy… I’m retired, OK, like you? This is observation only.’ He was doing this windscreen-wiper gesture with both hands. ‘No reports, no referrals.’

‘I’ll talk to her about it.’ Mumford seemed less than reassured, which was quite understandable.

‘I’ll call you, Andy,’ Merrily said.

Coming up to midnight, she was lying full-length on the sofa at Lucy’s old house, with Lol sitting at one end, her head in his lap. Low music was seeping from a boombox beside the glowing hearth.

‘I suppose I’m going to have to do something,’ Merrily said, ‘before it all falls apart on me.’

The sofa, delivered that day, was the only furniture in the parlour. It was orange, like the too-dark ceiling – never trust Jane in Linda Barker mode.

‘Psychiatrists,’ Lol said.

The weight of his own experience turned the word into some kind of lead sarcophagus full of decomposing remains.

‘I think I want to kill him,’ Merrily said.

The sofa smelled of newness and showrooms, but the scent from the fire in the inglenook was of applewood, the kindest, mellowest aroma in the countryside.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘You know…’

Oh, he knew… She was thinking of ‘Heavy Medication Day’, the only angry song on the new album. It was about his experiences on a psychiatric ward with a doctor who… over-medicated. Someone has to pay, now Dr Gascoigne’s on his way. A lot of residual bitterness there.

Last year, before they were a unit, he’d enrolled on a training course for psychotherapists, with the feeling that he could maybe, in some way, alter things from the inside. Discovering fairly soon that mere psychotherapists weren’t anywhere near the inside and, like all therapists and crisis-counsellors, they were ten-a-penny nowadays. And so Lol had walked away from it, back into music.

He slid a hand under her hair. ‘How necessary are they?’

‘Shrinks?’

‘I mean in Deliverance.’

Merrily thought about it. ‘You could probably say they’re only actually essential when you’re dealing with someone who thinks he or she is possessed by something… external. A psychiatrist would be able to detect symptoms of, say, schizophrenia.’

‘Symptoms of schizophrenia don’t necessarily prove the person actually is schizo,’ Lol said.

‘No, but it’s something that needs to be eliminated.’

‘How often have you had a case of demonic possession, then?’

‘Never. As you know. Never had a case where it was down to schizophrenia, either.’

‘So the idea of having a psychiatrist as a permanent part of your Deliverance group…’

‘Could be overkill,’ Merrily said. ‘If you consider that most of what we’re dealing with are what you might call non-invasive psychic phenomena… then if you have your resident psychiatrist insisting that it’s always down to delusion, hallucination, comfort chemicals in the brain, et cetera…’

‘… Then what’s the point of people like you?’

‘Listen to us, we’re finishing one another’s sentences,’ Merrily said. ‘How cosy is that? What’s this music?’

‘Elbow. Cast of Thousands.’

‘It’s lovely.’

‘It’s bloody terrifying. I don’t know why I bother.’

‘Never mind, they were probably influenced by you.’

‘You vicars can be so patronizing.’

Merrily looked around in the firelight, among the paint cloths and the ladders, for a clock. Jane was out with Eirion, as usual on a Friday night. By agreement, she was always home by one.

There wasn’t a clock anywhere yet. She guessed she’d been here about an hour and a half.

‘So, anyway, I called Andy before I came out,’ she said. ‘I’m going over tomorrow to see his mother. Not being much help around here, am I?’

‘You’re crap at painting anyway. You told the shrink you’re going?’

‘I really don’t know what to do. I mean, this is routine pastoral stuff. I wouldn’t be going if it wasn’t Andy Mumford – I’d refer it to local clergy. It doesn’t need a psychiatrist, so why set a precedent? You’re right, it’s overkill. All this belt-and-braces stuff, the Church covering its back, never sticking its neck out…’

‘Can you cover your back and stick your neck out at the same time?’ Lol bent and kissed her, one hand pushing her face into his, the other hand…

‘Mmmmph…’ It suddenly struck her that there were no curtains in this room and one window overlooked Church Street.

‘You’ve gone stiff,’ Lol said.

She sat up. ‘You should talk.’

‘We could go upstairs, take some cushions. Merrily, people know…’

‘I need to get home. Jane’ll be back. Besides, if you’ve got to drive back to Knight’s Frome—’

‘I’m going to sleep here on my nice new sofa,’ Lol said. ‘There’s this guy from Q magazine coming tomorrow, quite early.’

‘He’s coming here?’

‘Prof didn’t want him poking round the studio. We’ve got Tom Storey in, mixing his album. Prof’s a very private producer, Tom hates the media. I won’t say a word about you, you know that.’

‘It shouldn’t be like this.’ Merrily stood up and straightened her sweater. ‘I’m sorry. I mean, there’s probably no real reason for…’

‘We’ll get there,’ Lol said.

Would they? Within a few weeks, when his intermittent tour was over, he was going to be living here permanently. She supposed that what the new-home cards on the window sill were saying was that it was time to stop being coy and covert.

‘Oh hell, Lol, let’s – I don’t know – put a notice in the window at the Eight till Late or something.’

‘Uh…’ Lol went over to the window where the cards were. ‘You should know about this.’

Handing her a folded paper. She took it to the hearth and opened it out. It wasn’t hard to read it by the firelight. Big letters.

FIND YOUR WAY IN THE DARK?

‘Oh.’ Not a universal welcome, then.

‘I’d have said it was somebody having a laugh,’ Lol said, ‘but I can’t think of anybody… I mean, it’s not that funny, is it?’

She refolded the paper, annoyed. ‘You might as well tell the guy from Q. It would at least end this kind of stuff.’

‘Not in the context in which they’d run the story. It’d have to be from my side… the arrest, the loony bin. My Years of Hell. Now finding happiness at last, with a good woman in every sense, and letting it all come out in the music.’

‘God.’ Merrily shuddered. ‘Let me think about this.’

When she left, she went by the back door, reaching Church Street via the alley. Keeping to the shadows until she was approaching the square, where security lamps lit the front of the Black Swan and only two cars were still parked.

What was coming back was what Huw Owen had said.

Had your picture in the paper once too often.

He was right, of course. Deliverance was the Church’s secret service. Essentially low-level. Publicity was seldom helpful. No room at all for the cult of personality.

Maybe the Deliverance group/panel/circle/whatever was a good thing. Good for her. Prevent her becoming proprietorial. A question of sharing, Martin Longbeach had said.

Always painful lessons to be learned about yourself, your attitude.

So why was she deciding, as she padded quietly across the cobbled street to the vicarage, that she would not ring Nigel Saltash about tomorrow’s appointment with Mumford’s mother?

5 Saturday Sun

NIGEL SALTASH CAME to pick Merrily up at ten.

Jane spotted him from the landing window on her way down from her apartment in the attic, calling down the stairs.

‘He’s got one of those cool little BMW sports cars.’

Merrily widened her eyes. ‘Like… gosh.’

‘He’s getting out. He’s wearing jeans and a cream sports jacket that could be Armani. He looks a smooth old bastard, Mum.’

Merrily said nothing, stepping into her shoes at the bottom of the stairs, sliding her slippers under the hallstand. She was still feeling resentful, manipulated. What Saltash had done was phone Andy Mumford himself last night, saying he’d tried to call Merrily but she was out. Finding out the time of this morning’s proposed visit to Mumford’s mother and then leaving a message on Merrily’s machine suggesting he pick her up: no point in a convoy.

‘So how badly do you think he fancies you?’ Jane said.

‘He’s seventy-one, flower.’

‘The new dangerous age. They’re getting in as much sex as they can before it’s too late. Apparently, at that age they can only hold an erection for five minutes max, and it’s counting down all the time, did you know that?’

‘Oh, Jane…’

‘And, listen, you’ve got to stop calling me “flower”. You’ve been calling me “flower” since I was seven.’

‘I’ll try.’ Merrily pulled her coat from the peg. ‘What are you doing today?’

‘In the absence of his girlfriend, I’ll probably help Lol finish painting Lucy’s living room.’

‘I don’t think so.’

Jane peered down at her, hands on hips. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘The guy from Q magazine’s coming to interview him. Teenage girl walks in, the guy remembers Lol’s history.’

‘Oh, that is…’ Jane bounded downstairs. ‘That is like totally ridiculous. It was twenty years ago. He was a kid. And he was fitted up, and if the guy from Q’s done his research he’ll know that.’

‘No smoke, flower. Just stay away until he’s gone, OK?’

‘Hah!’ Jane stopped, with an arm wrapped around the black oak post sunk between the flags like a tree stump at the foot of the stairs. ‘Now I understand. If the journalist sees me, Lol will have to explain whose daughter I am. And we can’t have that coming out, can we?’

Merrily sighed. ‘It’s a music magazine. They wouldn’t be interested anyway.’

‘Yeah, but doesn’t the same firm publish Heat?’

‘Jane, please? Humour me?’

Feet crunched the gravel outside and the front door was rapped. Merrily unbolted the door, telling herself that some Deliverance teams worked like this all the time, in tandem with a bloody shrink.

At the Eight till Late, now the only worthwhile shop in Ledwardine, a partitioned strip along the side of the main window was full of handwritten notices.

PUPPIES. Border Collie/Lab cross. Good working strain. Parents can be seen. £40… RESPECTABLE CLEANER NEEDED TWO DAYS A WEEK… MOUNTAIN BIKE, NEARLY NEW. EIGHTEEN GEARS.

That kind of stuff. Even the personal columns of the Hereford Times were loaded now with ads like: Live Adult-fantasy Chat… Venus’s 24-hour Wankline. But village noticeboards never changed – unless ‘respectable cleaner’ was some little-known rural euphemism for bondage-supervisor.

This window was Jane’s last hope, anyway. She’d checked out the prayer board in the church. She’d even, for the first time ever, been through the parish register to see if, by chance, somebody had endorsed their marriage vows in the hand that had also scrawled VICERAGE.

She’d photocopied the poison-pen note before giving it back to Lol. OK, maybe it wasn’t that poisonous. It was just that they all had to go on living here, and Lol and Mum had been through all kinds of crap already, and it just really pissed Jane off that there was some mean-spirited git in this village who begrudged them a hint of happiness.

And Mum was the vicar and therefore too nice to deal with it, and Lol was too timid, and so…

Mobile hairdresser. Women and men catered for.

She pulled the photocopy from her jeans, held it up to the window. Close.

Jim Prosser, who ran the shop, waved to her from inside. Jane put away the paper, waved back. Jim knew everybody in Ledwardine, must have seen a fair few handwritten shopping lists and weekly orders, for delivery. And he knew all about Mum and Lol.

Maybe not. And the lettering wasn’t that close.

She walked off down Church Street. Sharp Saturday sun slanting on Ledwardine, the black and white cottages and shops all tarted up for the early tourists looking for pseudo-antiques and maybe a weekend cottage to display them in.

Predatory Londoners on the spree. Jane had read in one of the Sunday property supplements that, now you couldn’t find a garden shed in the Cotswolds for much under half a million, the Welsh Border was no longer considered too remote for commuters. So Ledwardine, this classic calendar village still enclosed by ancient orchards, was well in the cross-hairs. Even its one-time council estate no longer looked like a council estate, with its new hardwood windows, rendered brickwork, conservatories bulging out like transparent blisters.

Hereford’s estate agents were doing faster business than Venus’s Wankline.

Lol had somehow squeezed in, though Jane guessed that his mortgage on Lucy’s house was crippling. And knew that when she got round to needing a place of her own there’d be like no chance here. And she liked Ledwardine, didn’t want it to become Beverly Hills with a botox population and Jim Prosser forced to stock disgusting pâté de foie gras to stay in business.

But unless you had a farm or something to inherit, you were stuffed. At least when the Church kicked her out of the vicarage Mum could move in with Lol. If that was acceptable to Mr Vicerage.

Who might be here right now on the square, watching.

Jane wandered around, keeping an eye open for Eirion’s car. After Mum had put her off going to Lol’s, she’d called Eirion at home in Abergavenny, and he’d said, yeah, OK, he could probably try and cobble together a few quid for the petrol; he’d come over. Less enthusiastic than he might have been. Was something cooling off? It was true that there were times when she felt she needed some space, maybe go out with someone else, just to, you know, compare. But the thought of Eirion with another girl… she couldn’t handle that.

She stopped in front of the two-up, two-down terraced cottage, separated from the pavement by a ridge of new cobbles. Lucy’s house. A little black Nissan was parked outside behind Lol’s clapped-out Astra. The man from Q? She thought of going round the back and letting herself in through the kitchen door that Lol never locked. Just sitting in the kitchen, listening.

But she knew that if Lol was being too self-deprecating she’d just get annoyed and give herself away. And she was annoyed enough already, at the carrion crows from Off scooping up Ledwardine. And at herself for being so insecure.

‘You must feel I’m rather on your back,’ Saltash said, cruising onto the Leominster road.

He had dark glasses on and his leather seat eased well back. There was a buttermilk sun, and the hedgerows on either side of the road were greening up almost in front of their eyes.

‘Well, I… tend to think that if you arrive with a psychiatrist most people feel a bit threatened,’ Merrily said. ‘Some of them have really had to steel themselves to approach someone like me, and so… we probably need to think of a way around that.’

Saltash chuckled. ‘Just as well I’m no longer a psychiatrist, merely a new member of the team who wants to learn.’

‘Probably a few things I could learn, too,’ Merrily said, being diplomatic for the moment. She was wearing civvies, jumper and skirt. In another parish, you didn’t make a show of what you were.

The BMW was swallowing miles in small, easy sips. When Saltash slowed for the Leominster traffic island, the engine made a thick and fleshy sound, as if it was powered by rising sap. With the size of insurance premiums and the cost of petrol, you peered into a sports car these days and almost invariably saw white hair and driving gloves. Merrily tightened her seat belt.

‘So what exactly do you want to know about ghosts, Nigel?’

‘Ghosts?’ Saltash twisted his head towards her, the cords in his long neck like piano wires. ‘Oh, ghosts are terribly interesting. Don’t you think? I doubt there’s ever been a wholly convincing study, though.’

‘That mean you’re thinking of making one?’

‘Be awfully time-consuming, but perhaps worthwhile. I’d certainly be quite interested in examining apparitions as subjective – or reflective – phenomena.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘A study of perceived apparitions to discover what they’re telling us about the perceiver.’

‘The ghost as a psychological projection of someone’s inner condition?’

‘Inner guilt, inner torment.’ Saltash joined a tailback of cars from Leominster’s town-centre lights. ‘Sense of loss. Repressed sexual desire. Is the perceived ghost, for instance, shadowy and quiescent? Is it urgent, or aggressive?’

‘So I can take it you don’t accept the possibility of ghosts as an objective reality.’

‘Merrily, the very word “ghost” ’ – Saltash’s smile broke out – ‘is surely an antithesis of the word “real”.’

‘So, even as a Christian—’

‘I don’t think the Bible has a lot to say on the subject. Or am I wrong?’

‘Well, it… occurs, here and there.’

‘But probably without a hard and fast definition of the term ghost. You see, I don’t know how far you personally go with this. I’m not going to ask you about your personal “psychic experience” – highly subjective, therefore rarely helpful, and not a can of worms I’d want to open at this stage of our relationship.’

This stage?

Merrily had the feeling of being worked, becoming the subject of some kind of private thesis. And guessing that whatever she said next would seep, at some strategic point, back to Siân Callaghan-Clarke.

There was that mellow, new-car smell inside the BMW, a discreet No Smoking sign on the dash. She wished she was alone, in her rattling Volvo.

‘Look, I… I don’t have a particular problem with psychological projection. Probably does account for a lot of ghost stories. But it doesn’t fully explain the traditional haunted house, does it? Where something is seen again and again, by more than one person. How would you deal with that?’

‘Where do you want to start?’ The lights turned green; Saltash turned left. ‘Preconditioning? Folie à deux on a grand scale? If I were a physicist, I might even be drawn to seek a more scientific explanation of the trace-memory theory. But that’s not my backyard. The mind’s where I live. Edging, a touch warily for the moment, however, around Jung’s collective unconscious.’

‘So I’d be safe in assuming that the whole idea of the unquiet dead… would be well over your belief threshold.’

‘Merrily…’ Nigel Saltash wore his smile like a gold medallion. ‘Do you think we know each other well enough yet to even raise that question without the risk of permanent damage to an otherwise promising relationship?’

Promising? Promising how?

They were leaving Herefordshire now, and the personality of the countryside was changing. She saw the plains and ridges and escarpments of Shropshire: a bonier landscape, a lighter green, a bigger sky.

She saw, far in the east, the sawn-off slope of the Clee Hills. And then, momentarily, in the middle distance, fading out of the morning mist to the north-west, the tower of the church that was sometimes called the Cathedral of the Marches.

St Laurence’s, Ludlow. The ancient town clustered below it, an island in amber. A small town with an antique lustre and a bigger history than the whole of Herefordshire.

No town that ancient is unhaunted, Merrily thought, irrationally.

At first, Lol had thought, He’s too young.

Too young to know the background. Too young to understand how difficult it had been to get anywhere in the 1980s with music that was soft and breathy and woven into a mesh of acoustic guitars, when everything else was shiny and synthesized and nobody had heard of Nick Drake, and the Beatles were archaeology.

Jack Fine sat on the shorter stepladder, his microphone between his knees, wired to a mini-disc recorder in his jacket pocket. He had floppy hair and sulky lips and looked like he could be about nineteen. But then so did a lot of blokes that Lol learned later were in their mid-twenties. A sign of age, but he tried not to worry about this any more. And it became clear that Jack Fine did know the background. Maybe too much of it.

‘So, as I understand it, Lol, this goes back to when this other guy in the band – Karl Windling? – was hot for this groupie, and he roped you in to keep her mate occupied. And they were both under-age, and you got stitched up?’

‘I was eighteen,’ Lol said patiently. ‘I was very naive.’

‘But you were the one who finished up getting arrested and taking the rap—’

‘For something that never even happened.’

Oh God, how many times was he going to have to tell this wretched story? Even Karl Windling was history – dead in a road accident two years ago.

‘Leaving you with a police record,’ Jack said.

Lol nodding wearily. ‘And then my parents… they were tied into this fundamentalist religious sect, and they disowned me. And everything went downhill from there. Got the wrong kind of help, cracked up, wound up in a psychiatric hospital, and… Listen… Jack… I’m not trying to cover anything up or tell you your job or anything, but would it be possible to maybe not go into all this again?’

‘Lol…’ Jack leaned over his mike, his fair hair falling over his forehead and covering up one eye. ‘Look, man, OK, I can gloss over it. I can deal with it in, like, a couple of paragraphs? It’s just that you seem to be putting this experience into a few of the songs on the album?’

Lol sighed. No way round this.

‘The song “Heavy Medication Day”,’ Jack said. ‘The one that goes, “Someone’s got to pay, now Dr Gascoigne’s on his way.” What’s that about?’

‘It was just a particular doctor who was – how can I put this? – liberal with the medication. Anything for a quiet life. And probably so people wouldn’t know what he got up to on the side.’

‘Go on.’

‘Uh-huh.’ Lol shook his head. ‘He knows and I know, and all the rest is… just a song.’

‘There’s real anger in that song, though, isn’t there? Which is unusual for you – it’s usually more sort of resigned. It’s as if this guy did something really bad to you.’

‘Not to me personally.’

‘So, what—?’

‘Can we leave this one, Jack?’

‘Seems to me this whole album is about your journey, through the system… back into the light, kind of thing,’ Jack said. ‘Like an exorcism.’

‘Not exactly the word I’d use.’

Jack grinned, like maybe he knew about Merrily. He couldn’t know.

‘So how did you wind up out here in the sticks?’

‘Well, I… came here originally with a woman. She eventually went off with someone else. And then, um…’ Lol leaned back on his sofa and paused for a few seconds while he worked out what it was best to leave out – like him leaving the village and then coming back, because of Merrily. ‘… Then I met Prof Levin, just as he was setting up his studio on the other side of the county. And I’ve been working there, helping Prof out, doing a bit of session stuff. And then Prof kind of persuaded me to do the album. So I owe it all to him, really.’

Lol got out a copy of the CD and put it on the boombox, and they sat there, amid the paint cans and the dust sheets, discussing the songs and people who’d played on the tracks.

‘Including Simon St John on bass and cello,’ Jack said. ‘That’s a real name from the past. And he’s a vicar now, right?’

‘He’s been a vicar for years.’

‘Cool.’

‘Yeah, he’s cool.’

‘But you’re nothing to do with the Church…’

‘Oh no.’

‘’Cause, like, your parents…’

‘It can put you off, when your parents are… extremists.’

A lorry full of gravel went clanging down Church Street, and Jack was silent for a moment, seemed to be thinking what else he could ask.

‘How long have you been in music-writing?’ Lol asked.

‘Oh, not long. My old man – he publishes specialist magazines now, but he used to be a newspaper reporter when he was young. But my grandad thought this was a really disreputable thing to be and he tried to persuade him to pack it in and get into the management side. My old man’s really encouraged me to go into cutting-edge journalism. Go for it, you know? Don’t look back.’

‘Music’s, er, cutting edge?’

‘I do other stuff. Anything that comes up, really. Anyway, Lol… I mean, you were really fucked up for a long time, weren’t you? It was like with Nick Drake – how long’s he been dead now, thirty years? I mean, like him you couldn’t cut it on stage, face an audience.’

‘I identified a lot with Nick Drake, from the beginning. Hence the name of the band, Hazey Jane.’

‘Huh?’

‘The Nick Drake song, “Hazey Jane”?’

‘Oh yeah, sure. Sorry, I thought you meant… So like, how did you get over that? ’Cause you did this amazing comeback gig… at the Courtyard in Hereford?’

Lol told Jack about all the help he’d had from Moira Cairns, folk-rock goddess, who happened to have been recording at Prof’s. How Moira had literally pushed him out in front of that audience. Scary? Oh yeah, cold-sweat situation. All those lights, all those faces.

‘And you’re still doing a few gigs as support for Moira, right? But you and her…?’

Jack moved his hands around.

‘Oh no,’ Lol said. ‘Nothing like that.’

‘But you’re with somebody?’

‘No, I live alone. A rural idyll.’

‘Right,’ Jack said. ‘Right.’

Still waiting for Eirion, Jane saw Lol and the guy from Q come out of the front door of Lucy’s house and walk up the street to the village centre. They seemed to be getting on OK. She didn’t know why she felt so responsible for Lol. He was just that kind of guy – vulnerable.

The journalist was a surprise. He didn’t look any older than Eirion, for God’s sake. He had a camera with him – a Nikon, digital-looking. Doing his own pictures, too. Jane slid behind one of the thick oak supports of the old market hall as they came onto the square. A few shoppers and tourists were glancing at them by now, and Jane saw that Lol was looking a bit unhappy.

‘’Course I won’t say where it is,’ the Q guy said.

‘Only the market hall’s fairly well known,’ Lol said. ‘Be a give away.’

‘No problem – we’ll face you the other way. Better for the light, too.’

The guy lined Lol up on the edge of the square, with the church in the background and people walking past, and Jane wondered if he was trying to simulate one of the famous black and white street-scene pictures taken for Nick Drake’s first album, Five Leaves Left.

And she wondered, not for the first time, if that was a good thing. Nick Drake’s music was wonderful but he surely represented the old Lol. He had, after all, killed himself with an overdose of antidepressants.

Jane saw Eirion’s car arrive – little grey Peugeot with the CYM sticker, identifying him as a Welshman abroad. Eirion drove slowly around the square to park in front of the vicarage gate, and Jane stopped herself from running across, waving. A measure of cool might be more appropriate. Try and cobble together a few quid for the petrol, indeed.

She strolled casually over the cobbles as Eirion climbed out. He spotted her at once and did his incredible smile – the kind of smile that said you were the only person who could make it happen.

Smooth bastard.

OK, he wasn’t. Eirion wasn’t smooth. He didn’t even know he had any charm.

When they’d finished kissing, he said, ‘Is there something wrong?’

‘Why?’

‘It’s very busy here today, isn’t it? I’ve never seen it like this.’

‘It’s Saturday.’ Jane looked back at the square. Lol and the guy from Q had gone already. Not a major photo-session, then.

‘Didn’t used to be like this on a Saturday, did it?’ Eirion said.

‘Tourism. It’s like tourists have suddenly discovered the area.’

‘Good for the shopkeepers.’

‘I suppose.’

Jane imagined the figure of Lucy Devenish, the ghost of Ledwardine past, standing in the shadows under the market hall. Lucy looking very old, the way she never had, and the poncho drooping. Something feeling wrong.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ Jane said.

6 On the Slippery Slope

MERRILY FOUND THE atmosphere stifling. Too much heat, food-smells, a sense of something out of everyone’s control.

She exchanged glances with Saltash from opposite ends of the sofa. Saltash raised an eyebrow. Mrs Mumford seemed to think he was some kind of priest. And the wrong kind, at that.

‘Where’s the Bishop?’ she kept shouting at her son. ‘You said you’d bring the Bishop. You never does what you says you’s gonner do.’

Mumford sat, impassive, on a hard chair by the TV, which was silently screening some Saturday-morning children’s programme: grown-ups wearing cheerful primary colours and exaggerated expressions, smiling a lot and chatting with puppets.

Soon after they’d arrived, Mumford’s dad had walked out. ‘Can’t stand no more of this. I’m off shopping. She won’t face up to it. You talk some sense into her, boy, else you can bloody well take her away with you.’

‘I’m cold.’ Mrs Mumford was hunching her chair dangerously close to the gas fire. ‘Fetch me my cardigan, Andrew.’

‘You got it on, Mam.’

Mumford looked down at his shoes. The room felt like the inside of a kiln. His mam wore this winter-weight red cardigan and baggy green slacks. She had one gold earring in, and that wasn’t a fashion statement. She looked from Merrily to Saltash to Andy. She’d done this twice before, as if she was trying to work out who they all were.

‘Why en’t the Bishop come?’

‘He en’t well, Mam, I told you. He had a heart operation.’

Her eyes filled up. ‘You’ll tell me anything, you will.’

‘Mam—’

‘He was always nice to me, the Bishop, he never talked about God and that ole rubbish. Used to come in when we had the paper shop. Used to come in for his Star nearly every night.’

‘Mam, that was the old bishop. He don’t live here no more.’

‘He can’t tell me why, see! That’s why he don’t wanner come.’ She turned to Saltash. ‘Can’t tell me.’

Mrs Mumford stared at Saltash in silence. Merrily looked away, around the room. The walls were bare, pink anaglypta, except for a wide picture in a gilt frame over a sideboard with silverware on it. But the picture had been turned round to face the wall. All you could see was the brown-paper backing, stretched tight.

What was it a picture of? Ludlow Castle?

‘What would you like the Bishop to tell you?’ Saltash asked.

Mam kept on staring at him, like she knew him but couldn’t place him. You could feel her confusion in the room, like a tangle of grey wool in the air. Her voice went into a whisper.

‘Why did God let her take him?’ Starting to cry now. ‘Why did God let that woman take our boy?’

Saltash leaned forward. ‘Which woman is that, Phyllis?’

‘You’re supposed to be a policeman!’ Mam rounding on Andy, chins quaking. ‘Why din’t you stop her?’

Andy Mumford drew a tight breath through clenched teeth, the veins prominent in his cheeks.

‘The Bishop, when he come round, he sat on that settee with a cup of tea and a bourbon biscuit and he never mentioned God nor Jesus, not once.’

Merrily said softly, ‘Mrs Mumford, who was the woman?’

Mam didn’t look at her. ‘I can’t say it.’ She pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve and blew her nose. Saltash caught Merrily’s eye.

Andy said, ‘Mam, you can say anything to Mrs Watkins, and it won’t go no further.’

‘What… this girl?’

Mam snorted. Mumford looked helplessly at Merrily.

‘Phyllis,’ Saltash said. ‘I think you were starting to tell us about Robbie.’

‘Oh…’ She smiled suddenly, her face flushed. She sat up, centre stage. ‘He loves it here, he does.’

‘He felt safe here.’

‘He loves it.’

‘He was interested in history, wasn’t he?’

‘He loves all the old houses. He’s always walking up and down, looking at the old houses. He knows when they was all built and he knows who used to live in them. You can walk up Corve Street with him, and he’ll tell you who used to live where, what he’s found out from books. Reads such a lot of books. Reads and reads. I says, you’ll hurt your eyes, reading in that light!’

‘Phyllis,’ Saltash said. ‘Can you see Robbie… reading?’

‘No!’ She reared up, nodding the word out, hard. ‘I don’t need to see him no more. I said, please don’t let me see him. I don’t wanner see him like that…’

‘Like that?’

‘All broken. I don’t wanner— I just hears him now. Nan, Nan… Sometimes he’s a long way away. But sometimes, when I’m nearly asleep, he’ll be real close. Nan…’ She smiled. ‘And he draws them, the old houses. He’s real good. Draws all them old houses. And the church. And the ca—’

She stopped, her mouth open. And then her whole face seemed to flow, like a melting candle, and a sob erupted, and she clawed at her face and then – as Merrily stood up – kicked her chair back, dropping her hands.

‘She took him off.’

‘Mam!’ Andy knelt by the side of the chair, steadying it. ‘You mustn’t—’

‘She pushed him off, Andrew.’

‘No,’ Mumford said. ‘Now, that didn’t happen. Did it?’

‘Pushed him off,’ his mam said. ‘He told me.’

‘What do you mean?’ Mumford staring up into his mother’s swirling face. ‘What are you saying?’

Outside, the sun had gone in and there was a cold breeze. Merrily stared across the car park at the Tesco store. Its roof line had a roller-coaster curve, and she saw how this had been formed to follow the line of the hills beyond the town.

Some town – even Tesco’s having to sing in harmony.

She felt inadequate. Something wasn’t making sense. Or it was making the wrong kind of sense. There was an acrid air of betrayal around the house where the Mumfords lived, in the middle of a brick terrace, isolated now on the edge of one of the new access roads serving Tesco’s and its car park. When they came out, Nigel Saltash had spotted Andy’s dad walking back across the car park with a Tesco’s carrier bag, a wiry old man in a fishing hat.

‘Think I’ll have a word, if that’s all right.’

Mumford nodding glumly, sitting on the brick front wall of his parents’ home, looking out across what seemed to be as close as Ludlow got to messy. The train station, small and discreet, sat on higher ground opposite the supermarket. Lower down was an old feed-mill, beautifully preserved, turned into apartments or something. Then tiers of Georgian and medieval roofs and chimney stacks and, above everything, the high tower of St Laurence’s, like a column of sepia smoke.

‘The doc says she needs assessment,’ Mumford said. ‘Should have had assessment some while back. See the way he looked at me?’

‘It’s how he looks at everybody,’ Merrily said. ‘He’s a psychiatrist.’

Her hands were clasped across her stomach, damming the cold river of doubt that awoke her sometimes in the night – the seeping fear that most of what she did amounted to no more than a ludicrously antiquated distraction from reality.

‘Checking out the old feller now, see,’ Mumford said. ‘Next thing, he’ll have the bloody social services in. This is—’ His hands gripping the bricks on either side. ‘She’s got worse, much worse, since the boy died.’

‘A dreadful shock can do it. Reaction can be delayed. It doesn’t necessarily mean she’s on the slippery slope.’

‘At her age,’ Mumford said, ‘what else kind of slope is there?’

Merrily paced a semicircle. She saw Saltash, just out of earshot. His head was on one side, and he was pinching his chin and nodding, flashing his mirthless smile as Mumford’s dad talked, his carrier bag at his feet. She was remembering Huw Owen’s primary rule: never walk away from a house of disturbance without leaving a prayer behind.

Had she left without a prayer because she was afraid it might have inflamed the situation? Or because Nigel Saltash was there?

‘Just because I’m working with a psychiatrist doesn’t mean other possible interpretations go out of the window.’ She bit her lip, uncertain. Hoping she wasn’t just fighting her corner for the sake of it. ‘What do you think she meant about a woman pushing him off the castle?’

Mumford shook his head. ‘She never said that before.’

‘Does it make any sense?’

‘There was a witness – bloke lives over the river. Steve Britton showed me the statement. Bloke saw him fall. Nothing about anybody else. I… Where’s she get this stuff from? Never said nothing like that before. I don’t… Christ, I need to check this out, now, don’t I? You’re right, it’s easy enough to say she’s losing it.’ He sprang up from the wall. ‘I dunno… at every stage of your bloody life you become somebody you said you was never gonner be.’

‘In what way?’

‘Ah… you’d be on an investigation: murder, suicide, missing person, and there’d always be some pain-in-the-arse busybody relative – never the father, always someone a bit removed from it – who’d be trying to tell you your job. Have you looked into this or that aspect, have you talked to so-and-so, why en’t you done this? You wanted to strangle them after a bit. But the truth is there aren’t enough cops to do half of what needs doing. And so things don’t come out the way they should, things gets left, filed, ignored…’

‘Be careful, Andy,’ Merrily said, for no good reason, knowing she wouldn’t be careful in a situation like this.

‘Airy-fairy sort of feller, apparently – writes poems and publishes them hisself.’

‘Who?’

‘The witness. I’ll mabbe go see him. Got time now, ennit? Got time to be the busybody pain-in-the-arse uncle. Nobody bothered about the kid when he was alive, except for one ole woman.’

‘Andy, I’m hardly the person to be disparaging it, but if she does think she’s been given this information by a… by Robbie…’

‘Could be something he told her days before, ennit? Before he died. Something that’s suddenly clicked. I been agonizing about Robbie’s death for three weeks now. Thinking, leave it till after the funeral, wait for the inquest. Now even Mam’s on at me to do something. Why din’t you stop her? Where the hell did she get that from, Mrs Watkins?’

On the edge of the car park, Mumford’s dad had picked up his carrier bag and he and Saltash had started back towards the house in the wake of Saltash’s all-concealing smile.

‘Andy.’ Merrily beckoned Mumford into his parents’ tiny front garden. ‘I think we should try and deal with this… Go back in. But not with him. Think of something.’

7 I’ll Be Waiting

THERE WAS ANOTHER clear reason why the implications of retirement were terrifying Andy Mumford.

His dad.

Reg Mumford was taller than his son and held himself stiff-backed and upright, but it was hard to believe now that he’d ever been a policeman. Still wearing his fishing hat, he was standing with his hands on the shoulders of his wife’s chair, as if it was a wheelchair. Merrily’s feeling was that this was because he didn’t want to look at her.

‘I reckon they’ve started watering the beer again, Andrew.’

‘You said.’

‘Have you found that?’

‘No, Dad.’

‘Always start doing it this time of year when the tourists come.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Prices goes up, too. Don’t seem two minutes since it was one and six a pint.’

‘Before my time, Dad.’

‘Hee, hee!’ Reg Mumford pointed at Andy, who was standing uncomfortably up against the sideboard near the picture that was turned to the wall. ‘You en’t gonner be saying that for long. Now you’re retired, see, time’s gonner speed up, time’s gonner flash by, you mark my words, boy.’

‘Mrs Watkins would like to talk to you again,’ Mumford said.

‘I’d be delighted to talk to this young lady, Andrew. Shall we go out for a drink, the three of us?’

‘She wants to talk to Mam, Dad.’

‘Won’t get no sense out of her,’ Reg said. ‘I can tell you that much.’

Merrily, still standing by the door, glanced at Andy Mumford, watched his lips retract, a sign of extreme frustration. They were getting nowhere here. Nigel Saltash had suggested lunch in one of the splendid new restaurants which, he said, now made visits to Ludlow such an unexpected pleasure. At least she’d got out of that, saying that she had a sermon to write, and then Mumford telling Saltash he had to pick his wife up in Dilwyn, not far from Ledwardine, so he could give the vicar a lift back.

She came over from the door and knelt on the rug in front of Mrs Mumford’s chair. Mrs Mumford contemplated her for a while and then began to nod, light graduating into her eyes as if the action of nodding was powering a small dynamo.

‘Now then. Now. I know who you are. I was a bit confused, the way that man kept smiling at me, but I know who you are now, my dear.’

Merrily smiled back. Somehow she didn’t think Mrs Mumford was going to get this right.

‘You were at the funeral, weren’t you?’

‘Erm…’

‘You’re the teacher. Yes. Robbie’s teacher. You was his favourite, you’re…’ Mrs Mumford started to prise herself up. ‘You’re his… history teacher!’

‘Well, I—’

‘’Course you are.’ Reg Mumford was leaning over the chair from behind and pointing a forefinger at his own head, making screwing motions. ‘And we’re very glad to see you, aren’t we, Phyllis?’

‘He loved history,’ Mrs Mumford said.

‘Yes,’ Merrily said. ‘Yes, he did.’

‘Much bloody good it did him.’ Reg snorted. ‘Should’ve been out playing football. If he’d played football like a normal boy he’d still be alive. I’ve always said that.’

‘Dad, for Christ—’

‘Andrew, we gotter face facts. We’re all terrible sorry ’bout what happened, but it en’t no use blamin’ ourselves for ever and a day, is it? Boy was a bloody dreamer, head in the clouds, no gettin’ round it.’

‘All right, Dad,’ Mumford said, desperate. ‘We’ll go to the pub, you and me, eh? Half an hour, Mrs Watkins, will that be all right?’

Merrily nodded, grateful.

‘Now, I know I had something to show you,’ Mrs Mumford said. ‘Where did I put it?’

Merrily had made tea for them both. The kitchen wasn’t as clean as it might have been; she’d wondered if there was a home help. Mrs Mumford didn’t seem to be disabled, but she was very overweight.

‘Look in that top drawer, would you?’ She seemed to be accepting Merrily, now they were on their own, but not as a priest; she wouldn’t be ready for that. ‘No, no, not that one… the long one… that’s it.’

‘This?’ Merrily opened the drawer and found a hard-backed sketch pad inside.

‘There it is. Will you bring it over?’

‘Phyllis… why’s this picture turned to the wall?’

‘Eh?’

‘The picture.’ Merrily touched it.

‘No! You leave that alone!’

‘OK.’ She drew back, took the sketch pad to Mrs Mumford who put it flat on her knees. Merrily pulled up a dining chair. An envelope fell out of the sketch pad and she caught it and put it on the chair arm.

‘Don’t know what that is,’ Mrs Mumford said. ‘Now, look at these. He spent hours on these. You’ve got to be careful not to touch them or it’ll all come off. He had a spray, he did, but it still comes off.’

They were charcoal sketches. The first one was clearly of St Laurence’s Church, but its size was exaggerated so that the townhouses seemed like dog kennels. The second had been drawn from directly below, so that the tower resembled a rocket about to blast off. The perspective looked, to Merrily, to be spot on. There was light and shade and he’d smudged the charcoal to produce mist effects.

‘He was very talented, Phyllis.’

‘Sit there for hours, he would, drawing pictures of the church and the black and white houses. The others… we never sees them, they never comes to see their ole gran. Only Robbie.’

‘He loved being here with you, didn’t he? What’s this one? Is that what they call the Buttercross? With the little clock tower on top.’

‘Town council meets there. That one’s the Feathers Hotel.’

Mrs Mumford was much calmer now, leafing through the drawings, some identified underneath: Castle Lodge, The Reader’s House, the Old College.

‘Did he sit outside with his sketch pad?’

‘Too shy. He went out, see, and he looked at the old houses for a long time and he’d walk all round them and then he’d come back and he… you know… what do you call it?’

‘Drew them from memory?’

‘That’s it.’

Either Robbie had had a photographic memory or he’d really studied these buildings, come to know them intimately. Whichever, it was remarkable. Merrily said this to Phyllis, and Phyllis began to cry silently, the tears just coming, her cheeks swollen and shiny like the pouches that fed hospital drips, and Merrily held her hand, and Phyllis said, ‘He’s dead,’ looking up at her, as if pleading for a contradiction.

‘You’ll see him again, Phyllis.’

‘No.’ Phyllis’s fingers tightening in a spasm, flooded eyes gazing past Merrily now, at the picture turned to the wall.

The atmosphere in the room seemed brown and felt dense, as if the air was flecked with clouds of midges. The sketch pad slid to the carpet.

‘Phyllis, will you say a prayer with me?’

‘The only one of ’em ever come to see his ole gran,’ Phyllis said.

Did she mean still?

‘Can I say a prayer?’

‘When’s the Bishop coming?’

‘I’ll make sure he comes,’ Merrily whispered. ‘I’ll bring him. I promise.’

‘Can’t see the Bishop like this.’ Phyllis pulled her hand away. ‘State of me.’

‘You’re upset, and you’ve got every reason to be.’

‘Going to the bathroom.’

‘OK.’ Merrily helped her up. Phyllis had a bandage on one leg, rumpled, and it wasn’t clean. ‘Will you be all right? Does that dressing need…?’

‘I’m all right. That woman will come… my… Gail, is it?’

‘Andy’s wife.’

‘She’s a nurse.’

Her daughter-in-law of… thirty years, was it? Merrily held open the door that led to the hall. ‘Have you got a downstairs…?’

‘I’m all right, girl.’

Merrily left the door open, went to pick up the sketch pad. It had fallen open at a drawing of what looked like a high stone wall with a jagged white hole in it the shape of a figure, like when a cartoon character crashed through brick-work. She picked up the pad, took it back to the open drawer, listening for Mrs Mumford’s movements down the hall.

Problems here, and nobody would challenge Saltash’s assessment.

When she was putting the pad away, light from the front window showed how she’d misinterpreted the drawing. It wasn’t a hole in the wall, it was a white figure in the foreground, a vaguely female figure with the charcoal smudged around it to suggest a glow, a halo. It was two-dimensional, without contours, featureless.

It seemed to be the only figure in any of Robbie’s drawings.

Merrily closed the sketch pad, put it away in the drawer, went back to plump up the cushions on Mrs Mumford’s chair and spotted the white envelope that had fallen from the sketch pad.

It seemed legitimate to open it.

Inside the envelope was a picture postcard, an atmospheric filter photo of Ludlow Castle in a pink and frosty dawn light, the message written in black fibre-tip across the full width of the card.

Dear Marion,

I am in Ludlow again as I told you and it’s brilliant here even on my own altho when I am walking through the castle I feel you are there with me and then I feel really happy.

Sometimes I pretend you are walking next to me and we are holding hands and it’s brilliant!!!! Everything is all right again, and I never want to leave cos this is our place.

I was so miserable I didn’t think I could stand it till the end of term. Its worse than ever there. I hate them, they are stupid and ignorant and they are trying to wreck my whole life. The nearer it gets to the end of the holidays the sadder I feel and don’t want to go back there and I wish I could stay here with you for ever.

Please come like you promised you would.

Please, please, please come.

I’ll be waiting.

On the way back, in Mumford’s car, coming down from Leominster towards the Ledwardine turning, Merrily said, ‘I did a brief house blessing, no fuss, a prayer for Robbie to be at rest, and the Lord’s Prayer.’

‘She even realize what you were doing?’

‘She’s not that far gone, Andy. Although I don’t think she quite got the point that I was a priest. Hard to say. Erm… look, I’m going to talk to the Bishop, OK? I mean, she asked for him, right?’

‘All that was…’ Mumford looked embarrassed. ‘They both knew him quite well, the Bishop, Mr Dunmore, back when they had the paper shop. Hardly ever went to church, mind, certainly not the ole man, but it didn’t seem to bother him. But, hell, he’s Bishop of Hereford now. We can’t just get the Bishop of Hereford to an old woman who—’

‘What… like, if it was the dowager Lady Mumford it wouldn’t be a problem? Of course we can get him. You got me – I mean you were concerned enough to think it might be something we could help with.’

‘Wish I’d never bothered. The ole man, he don’t give a toss.’

‘He’s not making her feel any better, is he? Do you think he even notices?’

‘Mrs Watkins, the fact is he’s been treating her like she’s daft for half a century.’

A stray spatter of rain landed on the windscreen. Merrily took a breath.

‘Well, I’m not sure she is.’

‘What’s that mean?’ He almost turned at the wheel, but the old Mumford set in and he kept on looking at the road.

‘It’s a feeling. Based on this and that. Who’s Marion?’

‘Who?’

‘Did Robbie have a girlfriend?’

‘Too shy.’

‘That’s what your mother said. But there was an unfinished message on a postcard. In an envelope in Robbie’s sketch pad. Begging someone called Marion to meet him at the castle. He said it was their special place. He said he was imagining them holding hands.’

‘Written by Robbie?’

‘He hadn’t signed it yet, but the handwriting matched the titles he’d put on some of the drawings. Also, was he having a bad time at home?’

‘Not according to his mother, but that don’t mean a thing. If I had a home like his, I’d’ve been having a bad time.’

‘Perhaps you should read the card,’ Merrily said. ‘I put it back in the sketch pad, next to a rather strange drawing.’

‘Strange how?’

‘Difficult to explain.’

Cole Hill came up in the windscreen, and the church steeple, and rain came on for real. Two o’clock in the afternoon, and it felt like dusk.

‘Marion,’ Mumford said. ‘Don’t mean a thing. You ask the ole girl?’

‘I didn’t mention it. She was already upset, so I just did the prayers.’

‘She seemed calmer.’

‘Final point,’ Merrily said. ‘The mirror turned to the wall.’

‘Couldn’t fail to notice that, could you?’

‘I thought it was a picture, so I had a quick look while she was in the loo – thinking maybe it was a picture of the castle or something.’

‘Mirror.’ Mumford sighed. ‘Dad wouldn’t let her take it down. Nothing to straighten his tie in.’

‘I’m not happy with this, Andy.’

‘No,’ Mumford said.

Sermons: every week another one hanging around your neck like a penance, supporting the traditional assumption, from the days when the priest was the only person in the village who could read, that you could stand up there in the pulpit having universal truths channelled through you, when all you really had were questions.

An hour after Merrily got back to the vicarage, the computer in the scullery was still switched off, Ethel the cat curled up in the tray next to it. On the sermon pad she’d scrawled a number of questions, including: old people – why have we stopped listening to them?

Maybe, one day, something unexpectedly profound would get pushed between the lines, a surprise parcel in the spiritual letter box. One day.

The phone rang.

‘Merrily, this is Siân. Just a very quick call. Nigel and I had lunch – apparently, you were late with your sermon.’

‘Well, I always like to leave it till the last minute. Keeps it fresh, like… like a salad.’

God, why does this woman always make me talk bollocks?

‘Anyway, Nigel was impressed with your handling of a rather difficult situation.’

Huh?

‘Inevitably, when people we’ve known for years, like ex-Sergeant Mumford, are involved, we feel we have to go through the motions, don’t we? But I do think this case underlines the usefulness of having someone like Nigel who can confirm our own suspicions with some authority.’

‘Suspicions?’

‘He tells me he’s already given ex-Sergeant Mumford his own initial assessment, along with suggestions on how it should be followed up with his mother’s GP as early as possible next week. He’s also going to write up a short report for Sophie to keep on our database. And I think that concludes our involvement.’

‘That’s what you think, is it?’

‘Except, of course, as a discussion point amongst ourselves. I’ve given this a lot of thought, and I have to say there’s a danger that, by our very existence, we may, ahm, sometimes be actively encouraging people to inflate their feelings of paranoia or persecution, or their reactions to sudden and shocking bereavement, into something altogether more fanciful.’

By our very existence?

‘You’re suggesting we shouldn’t exist?’

Siân laughed. ‘Essentially, I’m merely saying that we – the Deliverance Ministry – if we are to lose the unsavoury aura of medievalism, should not be seen to bolster people’s protective fantasies. Encouraging them to deny personal responsibility by projecting it into something separate and amorphous over which they have no control. I’ll put this on the agenda for our next meeting, shall I?’

‘Erm…’

‘But thank you, all the same, for going to Ludlow with Nigel – although I gather he did the driving.’

‘Evidently.’ Merrily felt rage clogging her chest. ‘Siân, are we becoming a fu— focus group?

‘That’s becoming a derogatory term, I think.’

‘Because focus groups appear to be designed to obliterate the individual intuition by which something as inexact as Deliverance often stands or falls.’

‘One viewpoint, certainly,’ Siân said. ‘We could discuss that issue, also.’

Afterwards, Merrily sat watching the wind in the apple trees.

She folded up the pad and rang the Bishop at the palace behind Hereford Cathedral. Answering machine. She left a message asking what he was doing tonight, anticipating his groans, but this was important, even if she wasn’t sure exactly why. Intuition, maybe.

She rang Andy Mumford on his mobile.

‘Hold on one minute,’ Mumford said, and she heard him apologizing to someone else, and then he came back with a different acoustic – outside. ‘I was in with Mr Osman. The witness. Feller who saw Robbie fall?’

‘You went back to Ludlow?’

‘En’t far.’

‘Oh God, what are we doing, Andy?’

‘Think I’ve found a woman,’ Mumford said. ‘Mabbe two.’

8 Imbalance

‘HARD TO CREDIT,’ the Bishop said. ‘My God, how it’s changed.’

The street had narrowed, closing around the crawling Volvo. Merrily couldn’t see how the town centre could have changed much at all in about five centuries.

She had her window wound down. The dusk was dropping over Ludlow like muslin on antique trinkets, the cooling air singed with woodsmoke. The medieval timbered buildings on either side seemed to be reaching for each other, gables bent towards a creaking kiss under the dusty copper sky.

‘Not the buildings,’ the Bishop said. ‘Most of this town’s in aspic. Lay a finger on a brick and English Heritage will crucify you.’

‘With antique nails?’

‘Goes without saying. No, I meant the people. Even when I was living here, on a Saturday night you’d have the pub trade and not much else. Now look at them – listen to their accents. TV actors live here now, you know – and news-readers, politicians. And what are they all doing? Where are they all going? They’re going to dinner. Now call me a puritan…’

‘Inappropriate. You haven’t got the waistline for it.’

‘You’re very frivolous tonight, Merrily.’

‘Actually, I’m nervous,’ she said, ‘and I’m not sure why.’

The plan had changed. Andy Mumford wanted them to meet up at the spot where the man had seen Robbie Walsh fall. There were some things that Mumford thought Merrily should know before she took the Bishop to see his mother.

The Volvo was stuck in an unexpected queue of vehicles on the bottleneck corner near the Buttercross. She tapped the accelerator as the engine began to falter, recalling reading somewhere that Ludlow now had more Michelin stars than any other town its size in the country.

‘What exactly started this invasion of restaurants, Bernie?’

‘I think they had a food festival, which was a huge success. Perhaps someone realized there was something irresistible about expensive meals served in crooked oak-framed rooms with sloping floors. I don’t really know why it took off. All I know is that it’s virtually destroyed my chances of ever moving back one day. Nowadays, if you’re going to even look in an estate agent’s window in Ludlow, it’s advisable to swallow a Valium first.’

Bernie Dunmore was probably the first Suffragan Bishop of Ludlow ever to be given Hereford – safe pair of podgy hands after a difficult period. All the same, he was often heard to say he wished they’d left him alone; seemed to have personal history invested here.

‘Which is how we arrive at a possibly dangerous imbalance,’ he said. ‘It’s always been a friendly town, but there’ll be resentment, inevitably, from people who were born here and have been thoroughly priced out. Even the likes of me – I wasn’t born here, but there’s nowhere quite like it. Once you’ve been here, you never want to leave.’

‘You do the Lottery, Bernie?’

‘Is that a sin, do you think, in my position?’

‘Only if you pray for a result.’

The traffic broke and they emerged into the market square, turned sandy by the last of the sunset. There were shops either side of the square, and a wider street sloped down to the left: warped and tangled medieval timbers giving way to graceful Georgian terraces with their soft lights, and the wooded hills behind.

Serene, timeless, secure in itself. All of that.

The Bishop shaded his eyes against a sudden sunset flare before they drove back into shadows.

‘Straight on, Merrily. And then, just as you think you can’t go any further, follow the wall to the left.’

The wall. Directly ahead, across the square, flat as a film-set in the muddy dusk, was the reason, maybe, this town had survived to become so cool and comfortable in the twenty-first century.

By day, as Merrily remembered, the castle was more obviously ruined: sunny sandstone, like a big play area. Now, in fading light, it was seizing power again, dragging its history around it like a heavy military cloak. It was a royal history.

‘Didn’t Catherine of Aragon live here for a while?’

‘With the short-lived Prince Arthur,’ Bernie said. ‘And then she married his brother, who became Henry VIII, and the rest is… Oh, and the two ill-fated sons of Edward IV, they were here. The Princes in the Tower. Here in happier times – presumably. People tend to be happier here.’

She headed left, where he’d told her, along the walls. Ludlow Castle: lost and won, besieged and battered, but still hugging this craggy site, as if to stop the town crumbling into the river below.

‘I suppose hundreds of people must have died here.’

‘It’s just that most of us thought the deaths were over,’ the Bishop said.

Steeply down through Dinham, another ancient piece of town with a small medieval chapel dedicated to the martyred St Thomas of Canterbury, and across the bridge over the River Teme, with the castle behind them – from this side, as much of a fortress as it had ever been. She supposed that the highest tower was the keep, from which Robbie Walsh had fallen.

‘I suppose I ought to have come to the funeral,’ the Bishop said. ‘But it was David’s show and, with the TV cameras and everything, I knew there’d be scores of people there. Anyway, I didn’t think the Mumfords would remember me. I just bought my papers there.’ He sighed. ‘Suppose that’s why I felt obliged to come with you tonight, even though I’m not entirely sure what this is about or why she’d want to talk to me, especially.’

‘She liked you because you didn’t have much to say about God.’

Bernie grunted. ‘Limited opportunity to bring the Almighty into a transaction involving a packet of Polos and the Shropshire Star.’

She smiled, guessing he’d used the Mumfords’ shop as an information bureau, picking up on local gossip. He could look jovial and vague, but Bernie didn’t miss much. When he’d asked her how she was getting on with the Deliverance panel, she’d been glad it had been too dark for him to see her eyes while she was murmuring that this was something they perhaps ought to discuss. When there was more time. Like several hours.

‘Phyllis and Reg must have been well into their seventies when I knew them,’ the Bishop said. ‘I remember when they sold the shop we sent them a good-luck card.’

‘You ever see the boy?’

‘I’ve been trying to remember. I don’t think so. But he didn’t live here all his life, did he?’

‘Only the best bits, apparently.’

Across the river, the land gave in to ranks of dark conifers and the lane took them uphill. Cottages and a hotel had been flung into the hillside, lights coming on in them now. The road kept on climbing, and they did almost a U-turn and emerged, unexpectedly, onto a natural parapet.

Merrily slowed. ‘Gosh.’

‘Never been to Whitcliffe before, Merrily?’

‘It’s… incredible.’ She stopped the car at the side of the lane.

It was like arriving in the circle at a theatre, and the whole of Ludlow was the set… the best, most focused, most enclosed view of a whole town she’d ever seen – this fairyland of castle and ancient streets, like a richly painted wheel around the spindle of the church tower, haloed by the molten glow of evening.

Another car was parked a few yards away, two men getting out of it, one of them Mumford. The other man was taller and wore a big hat. Merrily eased the Volvo up behind them.

‘This chap happy to talk to us, Merrily?’

‘I think Andy kind of used you to square it with him – if the Bishop’s involved, it must be kosher. As it were.’

Merrily zipped up her fleece over the dog collar. It was cold now, for the end of April. Cold enough for frost. Mumford and the big-hat guy came over. Mumford wore a dark, heavy jacket.

‘Mrs Watkins, Bishop – this is Mr Osman.’

‘Gerald.’ The guy shook the Bishop’s hand and then Merrily’s. He was wearing a Barbour, and his wide-brimmed hat was waxed, too. An incomer, then. Pinched face, prominent teeth.

‘Mr Osman’s a writer,’ Mumford said.

‘Well… illustrator, mainly, and book designer. I produce local watercolours, with accompanying verse. A new career, in retirement, and a chance to immerse oneself in the place. And calendars. I also produce calendars. Gerald Osman.’

‘I think someone sent us one at Christmas, actually,’ the Bishop said. ‘Watercolours, yes. Keep it in my office.’

‘Do you really? You must come up to the house for a glass of wine afterwards. We’re at the bottom of the hill, this side of the river. My wife used to think it was so lovely having a house with such a wonderful view of the castle, but not so sure any more. Rather wishes it would all go away.’

‘Yes,’ Mumford said. ‘Perhaps you could show us, sir, where you were when you saw the… my nephew fall.’

‘Well, as I told you, it’s just… just here, actually. Quite a remarkable view of the castle, as you see. And it was earlier in the evening, therefore so much clearer.’

The sky was darkening fast now, a sharp shaft of burnt orange over the keep, getting duller, like a spearhead cooling after the forge.

‘I’ve painted it many times, at different times of day and night,’ Mr Osman said. ‘Often from this actual spot – so I do know this angle pretty well. As you see, it can look rather sinister in the last of the light, and in the rain it often has a faintly dolorous air. But in the early evening, on a fine day, it’s mellow – like the crust of a mature Cheddar. Everything very clear: every ridge, every fissure.’

‘If there’d been two people up there, do you think you’d have known?’ Mumford said.

‘Well, it’s rather further away than it looks from here, so human figures are very small, and I didn’t manage to focus my binoculars until I saw him fall – couldn’t believe it, obviously. Terrible shock.’

‘But you’ve spent a lot of time in the castle,’ Mumford said. ‘You’ve been up that tower.’

‘Of course. I’ve been everywhere, making sketches – which is why I recognized your nephew. I mean from the photographs on the TV, not when he was… falling… The moment the face came up on the screen I said to my wife, Good Lord, I’ve seen that boy several times. I’ve even talked to him.’

‘In the castle?’

‘When it was quiet, I’d sit in the castle grounds, make some watercolour sketches. I’m sure they come out just as well when I do them at home, from photographs, but I always felt I was honouring a tradition – all the distinguished artists who painted Ludlow Castle. Turner, for heaven’s sake! Not one of his best, I grant you.’

‘And the boy…’

‘Would come and watch me. From a distance at first. Normally, I’m quite wary of children, especially teenagers, with some of the malevolent little tykes around nowadays. But this boy was genuinely interested. Eventually telling me he did some drawings himself. And his extensive knowledge of the castle was apparent from the start – knew the names of all the towers, their history, the various stages of development. I was impressed.’

‘Knew his way around,’ Merrily said.

‘Absolutely. Rather a pleasant boy. Shy at first – I find shyness something of a virtue these days.’

‘And the woman,’ Mumford said heavily. ‘You were telling me about the woman.’

‘Ah. Yes. Mrs… Pepper? Lives in that rather splendid old farmhouse down from the bottom of The Linney.’ Mr Osman pointed somewhere to the left of the castle ruins. ‘Well, it’s a bit of a fraud, actually, was built up from very little by some professional restorer – who, incidentally, cut down a wonderful old oak tree, allegedly by mistake.’

‘And the woman herself…’

‘She bought the place earlier this year. She’s supposed to have been quite well known at one time – afraid I don’t know very much about that kind of music myself. She’s… like a number of people living here now, I suppose, somewhat eccentric.’

‘And you saw Robbie with her,’ Mumford said.

‘Oh yes.’

‘How many times?’

‘Well, twice, certainly. She’s quite distinctive, with the varying colours of her hair and the way she dresses.’

‘Dresses how?’

‘Oh… like out of a Victorian melodrama. Long coats. Swirly cloaks.’

‘I see. You ever talk to the boy when he was with her?’

‘Never. Some people one instinctively…’ Mr Osman cleared his throat. ‘But the boy would follow her around, and they’d be pointing things out to one another. If I hadn’t known she lived here, I would probably have thought they were tourists, a mother and son.’ He looked at Bernie. ‘I gather you’re a friend of the family, my lord.’

‘Just, ah, Bishop… please.’ Bernie had dressed down tonight – golfing jacket, corduroy trousers. ‘Yes, we’re all trying to help them come to terms with what happened.’

‘Dreadful thing. I did telephone the police station the next day to tell the sergeant I now realized this was a boy I’d seen in the castle. And about the woman. He didn’t seem to think that was very important.’

‘Oh?’ Mumford’s tone didn’t alter. ‘What did he say, exactly?’

‘He just said something to the effect that Robson Walsh was a familiar figure to a great number of people. Boy was clearly obsessively interested in the history of Ludlow and would talk to anybody who seemed to know something about it. Though why that particular woman would be considered a fount of local knowledge—’

‘I’m sorry,’ Merrily said. ‘Did you say she was a musician?’

‘Some sort of singer, I gather, at one time. Mrs Pepper. Hasn’t lived here two minutes – well, say six months. Admittedly, we’ve only lived here permanently for about three years ourselves, but it was our holiday home for seventeen years before that, so I think we’re permitted to feel a touch proprietorial.’

‘And you said she was eccentric…’

‘I try not to listen to gossip.’

‘You don’t happen to know her first name, do you?’ Merrily said.

‘I don’t think I do, no.’

‘Couldn’t be Marion?’

‘Doesn’t ring any bells. Well, not in that context.’ Mr Osman turned to Mumford. ‘You asked me that, didn’t you?’

‘Do you know anyone called Marion who… frequents the castle?’ Merrily asked.

‘Well, not…’ He laughed. ‘As I told Mr Mumford here, not someone I’ve ever seen.’

‘I’m sorry?’

Mr Osman didn’t reply. Over the town, the sky was turning a luminous acid green with early moonlight.

‘Ah,’ the Bishop said. ‘I think I understand. You mean Marion de la Bruyère. But that wasn’t the keep, was it, Mr Osman?’

‘It was the Hanging Tower, Bishop. I wrote some verse about her, for my calendar the year before last. Marion, whose endless death… is poised upon a midnight breath. Not… not awfully good, really.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Merrily said. ‘Three of you seem to know what this is about, but one of us doesn’t. Who are we talking about here? What does she do?’

‘She haunts,’ Bernie Dunmore said. ‘Allegedly.’

9 The Bishop’s Tale

THE BISHOP SAID he was confused: too much, too fast.

‘Why did you want to know if Osman had seen anyone else on the tower? I mean, surely you don’t imagine that someone actually killed the boy?’

The ornate lamps in the square were white, like magnesium flares.

‘We have’ – Merrily slotted the Volvo into a corner, down by a darkened delicatessen and well away from the castle – ‘a kind of reason to try and eliminate the possibility.’

God, she was thinking, do we? She had her window half-down, collecting music and laughter draining from a pub in a nearby street no wider than an alley, the sounds disconnected, somehow, as though on the tape-loop of a separate but parallel time-frame.

Eras overlapping: a disconcerting town.

All she’d told him earlier was about the supposed bereavement visions – that Phyllis Mumford had been in a distressed and confused state, that he was the only priest she seemed likely to open up to. There hadn’t seemed much point, at that stage, in going into what Phyllis had said about a woman.

But it was unavoidable now.

‘I see.’ The Bishop breathed in slowly. ‘That’s rather a difficult one, isn’t it?’

‘Only for a Deliverance consultant,’ Merrily said. ‘The rest of you are free to roll your eyes.’

‘If I could just say…’ Andy Mumford was a bulky shadow on the back seat. ‘The fact that Osman didn’t see another person don’t mean there wasn’t someone up there with the boy. Just they didn’t hang around afterwards.’

The Bishop shuffled. ‘You do know what you’re saying here, Andrew?’

‘After many years as a detective, Bishop, I think I got a basic idea.’

‘Yes, but what are you actually suggesting – kids fooling about and one falls off the tower? Or what?’

‘I was ready to believe,’ Mumford said, ‘that it was an accident. At first. Mabbe it’s what we all wanted at the time – no stigma with an accident. But now’ – he leaned forward between the front seats – ‘now it’s like something’s telling me, real strongly, that something en’t what it seems. You understand?’

‘Story of my life,’ Merrily said.

‘The night Robbie was found, after my sister ID’d the body, I go back to my mother’s house. There’s a woman outside. Long cape. Just standing there, looking across at the house. When I tried to talk to her, she walked off.’

‘What?’

‘What I could see of her face, she’d been weeping.’

‘Andy, you never even mentioned this before.’

‘Didn’t think too much of it afterwards. Spooked me a bit at the time, OK, but I was tired. Lot of neighbours been in and out the house. Lot of people dress funny in Ludlow these days – people going out to dinner.’

‘So the chances are your mother knows this woman?’

‘She was carrying a lantern – with a candle in it. Well, there’s a few shops in town now selling tat like that. You think, some crank, don’t you?’

‘We’ll certainly ask Phyllis about her,’ the Bishop said. ‘Perhaps clear it up.’

‘Meanwhile,’ Merrily said. ‘Can we…’ She squirmed a little. ‘Can we talk about Marion now?’

The ‘Dear Marion’ postcard. She talked about that.

‘When we go over there, I’ll ask Mrs Mumford if I can show it to you.’

‘Needs to be photocopied, I think, Merrily,’ the Bishop said.

‘Good idea.’

‘Then Andrew has to decide if the police should see it. Meanwhile, let me… let me get this right – this is a postcard, with a photograph of the castle on the front, written by Robbie Walsh to someone he actually addresses as… as Marion.’

‘Someone he imagines he’s walking with in the castle grounds, holding hands. And there’s a drawing of what appears to be a spectral female figure. Pleading with her to come to him. “I’ll be waiting,” he says.’

‘I see.’ Bernie Dunmore was silent for a moment. He seemed agitated. ‘What are your conclusions about that?’

‘The psychological one first?’

‘Please.’

‘Shy, solitary kid, fascinated by medieval history, besotted with Ludlow…’

‘You’re thinking fantasy-girlfriend,’ the Bishop said.

‘I don’t know. Is she fantasy-girlfriend material?’

He sighed. ‘All right… look… I do, as it happens, know something about this story. Goes back to the twelfth century. Or, in my case, about thirty-five years, to when I was a young curate. Here, as it happens.’

‘I didn’t know you were a curate in Ludlow.’

‘Not something I’ve ever emphasized on my CV. A bishop is expected to have been around. Unfortunately, once I’d lived here I didn’t want to end up anywhere else. Moved on, drifted quietly back. I’ve been, ah, fortunate.’

‘You jammy sod, Bernie.’

‘Yes, that’s another way of putting it. So… I happened to be a young curate at St Laurence’s when a chap called Peter Underwood – doyen of British ghost-hunters, though I didn’t know it at the time – was researching a book called, if I remember rightly, A Gazetteer of British Ghosts. It has quite an extensive entry on Ludlow – most of which, as it happens, is taken up by the story of Marion de la Bruyère. Marion of the Heath.’

She was usually described as ‘a lady of the castle’, Bernie said.

Which could have meant anything – possibly she was a lady-in-waiting, if there were such creatures in the reigns of King Stephen and his successor, Henry II.

Turbulent times. Less than a century after the Norman conquest, and the ownership of the new and highly strategic Ludlow Castle was in dispute. Stephen had put the fortress in the charge of a Breton knight, Joce de Dinan – arguably the source of the name Dinham, for the community under the castle’s perimeter wall, to the south-west. But the powerful baronial de Lacy family thought it should be theirs, and it was the conflict between Joce and the de Lacys that led to a young knight called Arnold de Lisle, a de Lacy man, being taken prisoner.

‘While not exactly established history, it’s certainly well-documented in a medieval epic known as The Romance of Fulk FitzWarrin,’ Bernie said. ‘Seems that Marion de la Bruyère – described by one source as “a guileless damsel” – had fallen in love with the prisoner, Arnold, and helped him escape from the castle either down a rope or knotted sheets.’

And then – her fatal mistake – Marion had arranged to let Arnold back into the castle, on a later occasion, by means of a rope ladder.

‘While the two of them are otherwise engaged in Marion’s bedchamber, a large number of armed men from the de Lacy camp come swarming up the ladder to capture the castle. Now we know that happened – de Lacy did get the castle. Appears to have slaughtered a lot of people and set fire to property in the streets of Ludlow that night to make it clear that he was now running the show. In fact, some of the killing and the burning would have happened exactly where we’re parked now.’

‘Thanks for that, Bernie.’

‘Anyway, when she finds out what’s happening, Marion – full of remorse and fury at his betrayal – snatches Arnold’s sword and kills him with it. And then – not seeing, presumably, much of a future for herself – she throws herself from a high window in the Hanging Tower.’

Merrily said, ‘But that—’

‘No, it’s not where Robbie fell. It’s a tower at the rear of the castle, facing the river. And the present Hanging Tower doesn’t seem to have been built until two centuries after these alleged events took place.’

‘But Marion…?’

‘Yes. Marion. There’s certainly quite an extensive section in Underwood’s book relating to her activities, post-mortem. It, ah, it was said that people could hear her final screams for many years, but the more recent stories relate to a sort of heavy breathing – supposedly as she psyched herself up either to dispatch Arnold or herself. Underwood told me he’d talked to a local man who’d heard it several times and researched it pretty thoroughly, disproving to his own satisfaction the theory that the noise was caused by a nest of young owls. Not possible in January, apparently.’

‘Nothing seen?’ Merrily said.

‘Ah… there was talk of a… a white lady. Nothing on record.’

‘But it seems likely that Robbie Walsh would have heard the stories.’

‘Best-known ghost story in Ludlow, Merrily. And there’s no shortage of competition in this town. There’s a chap now who conducts ghost-walks at least twice a week in the season. Marion, I’d guess, would be his star attraction.’

‘From what little I know about medieval history,’ Merrily said, ‘an unattached female, in those days, wouldn’t be far into her teens.’

Bernie coughed. ‘If at all.’

‘Robbie would have known that. He wandered the town alone. He might well have fantasized a relationship – maybe, at that age, no more than a rather romantic friendship – with a girl from the past, rather than a supernatural entity. The guileless damsel. The kind you rarely encounter today.’

Merrily thought about Jane, who wouldn’t have fitted the description ‘guileless’ since turning eight.

‘And written to her?’ Bernie said.

‘Gives a kind of substance to the fantasy. Makes her seem more real to him.’

‘Pleading with her to meet him? Saying he’ll be waiting?’

Merrily shrugged.

‘If that’s your psychological explanation,’ the Bishop said, ‘I’m not sure I want to hear the other one.’

‘I haven’t fully worked out the other one yet.’

They were silent for a few moments. A bunch of kids were whooping and kicking a lager can in the square. Merrily wound her window up.

‘Andy, isn’t it likely, given what Bernie says, that your mother would have heard the story of Marion?’

Mumford grunted. ‘I hadn’t. But then I en’t from yere.’

‘Could she be subconsciously associating it with Robbie’s death, is what I’m wondering. She’s seen his drawing. She’s probably read the letter, even if she’s forgotten about it. And in her confused state of mind…’

Out on the square, one of the boys who’d been kicking the can, shouted out, for no obvious reason, ‘Fuckin’ shiiiiiite!’ Merrily thought of the cries – somewhere on the tape-loop – of slaughtered citizens, hacked to death by de Lacy’s men, while the broken body of Marion de la Bruyère still lay at the foot of the tower.

‘And also, Andy, given that the card suggests a depth of unhappiness at home, doesn’t this open up another possibility?’

‘You’re saying suicide.’

‘In which case’ – Merrily looked over her shoulder at the shadowy Mumford – ‘would you really want to take it any further?’

‘Wrong tower,’ Mumford said stubbornly. ‘You heard what Osman said: boy knew that castle like the back of his hand. He wants to kill himself the way this girl did, why would he jump off the wrong tower?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Tell you what,’ Mumford said. ‘If you wanner stick with this ghost stuff, mabbe I’ll check out the real woman. The living woman. The one he was seen with. Mother and son.’

‘Mrs Pepper.’

‘If her name turns out to be Marion, what we gonner be looking at then?’

‘Look, it’s getting late,’ the Bishop said. ‘Perhaps we should go and do what we came for – see how we can comfort your mother. Perhaps hear what Phyllis has to say. And then… little prayer-circle, do you think, Merrily? Proper blessing of the house? How’s your father, Andrew?’

‘He’s all right.’

‘Probably showing less than he’s feeling if he’s the Reg I remember, but I’ll persuade him to join us. All right, Andrew, how about you drive down and prepare the ground? Merrily and I should perhaps… discuss tactics.’

‘Thank you,’ Mumford said. ‘Aye, I’ll go and talk to them. Thanks.’

He had to put his shoulder to the rear offside door, which jammed most times. When he’d gone, the Bishop turned to Merrily, his arms folded, his legs stretched out into the well.

‘So what’s all this really about?’ he said mildly.

She asked if she could have a cigarette, so they got out and walked down towards the centre of the town. There was a greenish sheen on roofs and a glare in window-glass as a near-full moon came up like stage lighting, sharpening the medieval gables and creaming the appropriately buttery stonework of the Buttercross with its neo-classical portico and its clock tower.

Eras overlapping like double exposures on a film.

‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you,’ Bernie Dunmore said. ‘I warned you last summer, before that trouble at the hop kiln nearly backfired on you. I said that, when dealing with matters that can never be verified, you needed to cover your back. Had to get some support around you.’

‘It just wasn’t as easy as you thought. The people I was hoping to get are not… joiners.’

‘Yes, well, unfortunately, in the Church of England the joiners are usually the ones trying to further a political agenda. I don’t know Siân Callaghan-Clarke very well, and I’m sure the hint of dominatrix I sometimes see in her eyes is pure illusion—’

‘Bernie, I never wanted a cosy life.’

‘—Whereas Saltash is someone I have had dealings with over the years, and the man has an ego the size of a Hereford bull’s balls, to put it bluntly. And, incredibly for a psychiatrist, he doesn’t appear to listen. So you have my sympathy there, Merrily. However…’

This was difficult. If Merrily wasn’t careful, the Bishop was going to think she’d generated this whole situation to bend his ear on the subject of control-freak Deliverance advisers, brought him out here to get him on her side.

‘Bernie, if you’re thinking—’

He lifted a hand. ‘We do share a secretary. Sophie gets e-mails from Callaghan-Clarke. Endlessly, it seems. Questioning this, questioning that, usually about the way we conduct Deliverance.’

‘She hasn’t complained to me.’

‘Hasn’t complained to me, either. Sophie doesn’t complain. Just hasn’t concealed the computer traffic. I mean, obviously, as soon as interest in using Saltash was expressed from the Dean’s office, of all places, I suspected we’d have problems, if only because I knew he’d rather like to repossess your office for general Cathedral admin.’

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘You knew he was hardly a Deliverance, ah, groupie, Merrily.’

She followed him across the narrow medieval street into the wide street that glided gracefully down to the Georgian era and the river.

‘How close is the Dean to Saltash?’

‘Not sure, Merrily, but I have the feeling he was once chaplain at a mental hospital somewhere. Oh, they’re going to try and tie your hands, between them, that’s not in doubt. As to Siân – whether it’s personal ambition on her part, or she’s firing someone else’s bullets, I wouldn’t know. But remember, whatever they try to make you do, you’re still the only officially trained Deliverance minister in this diocese.’

‘She’s certainly doing her best to discredit the man who trained me.’

‘Oh, don’t worry about old Huw – been there before, loves it. And you don’t have to do what you’re told. In fact, resisting the rationalists is probably an important part of your role. Tightrope, obviously, I’m not denying that, but then the whole job’s a tightrope.’ He pushed his hands into the pockets of his golfing jacket, watching his plodding feet in the moonlight. ‘Of course, you’ll never prove Saltash wrong, because to do that you’d virtually have to prove the existence of ghosts, wouldn’t you?’

‘Hadn’t thought of it quite like that,’ she lied.

‘I…’ He stopped under the awning outside the ancient and cavernous De Grey’s restaurant. ‘There’s something I didn’t tell you, Merrily.’

‘Oh?’

‘When the Underwood ghost book was published, I… All right, I was a curate, but I was still a young chap, played rugby, had some mates, and we used to go drinking on a Friday night. Not to excess, in my case, obviously, but we enjoyed ourselves. And I happened to have a copy of the book, and we… I mean, you know what young chaps are like…’

‘Do I?’

‘We’re in the pub one night, half a dozen of us, discussing this business of the heavy breathing in the tower – giving it somewhat salacious overtones, I’m afraid. I said it was all a load of rubbish, probably dreamed up to attract more visitors to the castle. Someone said, how can you say that, all the nonsense you’ve got to swallow and regurgitate every Sunday? Anyway, the upshot, there was a bet… ten quid.’

‘Lot of money back then, I’d guess.’

‘Curates were paid even worse in those days, and I was engaged at the time, so, yes, ten pounds… well worth having. There were five of them, and they threw in a couple of quid each. One of them, you see, knew a way into the castle at night, over one of the walls, Dinham end, and then… anyway…’

‘You didn’t…’

‘If it had been for a whole night, I definitely wouldn’t have, but it was quite a warm evening – warmer than tonight – and we agreed on two hours. I had to swear on the Bible that I wouldn’t sneak out. The deal was two hours, absolutely on my own in the Hanging Tower, and if I was still there when they came to get me, around half past midnight, the money was all mine.’

‘You astound me, Bernard.’

‘Wasn’t going to tell you in front of Mumford, that’s for sure. Anyway, we all went in together first. I’d never been in the Hanging Tower before. You have to go across the Inner Bailey – there’s a wonderful Norman chapel in the middle, dedicated to St Mary Magdalene – and then into a sort of great hall, which is rather eerie because it has these sculpted stone faces on the walls. One of my friends had a torch and he kept lighting up the faces, making woo-woo sort of noises. All pretty juvenile.’

They were walking downhill now, towards the old town gate, where the roadway still passed under an arch with lighted rooms over it.

‘The so-called Hanging Tower protrudes from the rear of the castle – must have been two or three storeys high originally, but there’s no roof now, so you can just see the windows in recesses, one above the other, and then the sky. Small rooms now – six of us filled the space, but when the others had gone… most unpleasant.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t have done it.’

‘It was a boy thing, as they say. Castle’s a very different place at night, hadn’t realized that – all that nice, mellow, honey stone. But when you’re absolutely on your own inside an enormous walled ruin, it’s… black. Smells… the thought of rats. And cold as hell in there, a clammy damp in the air. I spent the first hour at the window – least I thought it was an hour, probably ten minutes – looking out at the few visible lights. Night mist coming off the river, and I couldn’t see the ground, or the sky, and it felt… I gather it’s commonplace if you’re on a high building and suffering from vertigo to want to… you know…’

‘You wanted to jump?’

They were alone on the street, no cars for a few moments, and Bernie’s voice was resonating as though in a small church as they passed under the short tunnel which had once been Broad Gate.

‘Probably couldn’t squeeze through now, but I could have then. Didn’t like it, anyway, so I had to move back into the dark. In the end I found myself hunched up in a corner, in near-total darkness, which was like being entombed, and I… at some point I became aware of an unhappiness. Almost a physical thing, rather like when you feel the beginnings of a sore throat and it’s no more than an unpleasant taste. Have you ever tried to pray and you couldn’t?’

‘Not sure.’ Merrily lit another cigarette. ‘Been times I’m ashamed of when I just couldn’t do it because it seemed worthless… useless. Slippage of faith.’

‘No, we’ve all been there. This was an actual physical inability to pray when I very much wanted to. The way an asthmatic can’t find breath. Here I was, a fairly recently ordained minister of the Church, and I… could not pray.’

‘That would be scary.’

‘Panic. The unthinkable. The feeling that it just didn’t work here, that God had been excluded from this place. I remember – it seems laughable now— No, actually, none of that night seems remotely laughable – I remember thinking of the ten quid at stake, and how despicable that had been. How what was happening to me was a direct result of that. That what I’d done – taking that bet – had been almost evil. I… when you asked me earlier tonight if I did the National Lottery, no, I don’t. I’ve avoided anything approximating to a bet ever since.’

Merrily stopped on the wide pavement, under the first street lamp beyond what had been the town boundary, the road sloping to the River Teme at Ludford Bridge.

‘What happened?’

‘I ran away, of course. Or stumbled away would be more accurate. When I realized I was actually cringing into the stones, like a cornered animal, I… threw out a prayer, like a sort of yelp. Just God help me! Just praying that I could move. And I did move. Like the clappers. And you’re probably smiling.’

‘I’m not, honest, boss.’

‘I’ll cut it short. There are two ways out of that tower, and I took the wrong one at first and came up against some steps that led nowhere any more, a blank wall, and that was horrifying, as if whichever way I went I’d come up against a wall that hadn’t been there when I went in. Imagination, in these situations, becomes so unbelievably powerful. So I scrambled back down and back into the chamber and… well… that’s when I saw her. I bloody saw her.’

‘What?’

‘She was— Look at me…’ The Bishop held his hands out under a street light. ‘After all these years… still shaking.’

‘You saw Marion?’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, I don’t know who or what it was, but I remember I did know, with a quite awful certainty, that something was going to happen as soon as I re-entered the chamber. Partly because of the cold – yes, I do know that’s a cliché. But it wasn’t a normal cold, not a healthy cold – not like rushing wind or crackling frost. It was a negativity, an absence, a hollow-ness… an area in which warmth couldn’t exist. Any more than normal prayer.’

Bernie held the lamp-post, like a drunk, Merrily feeling chilled now. One of those attic moments, when you opened an old chest to expose ancient rotting fabric.

The Bishop’s tale. She wondered when he’d last told it to anyone. And she wondered why, in all the discussions they’d had about the nature of Deliverance, he’d never even hinted at a personal experience.

‘She… it was… as I re-entered the chamber, there was a paleness. I can see it now, but I still can’t properly describe it – only my own reactions to something that seemed to be made of nothing more than the cold air and the damp unfurling from the stone. I wasn’t aware of a face, but I was sensing a horrible smile that was more like an absence of smile. A smile so cold, so bleak, so devoid of hope… only this perpetual, bitter… terminality.’

Merrily brought the cigarette to her mouth. It had gone out. As she fumbled for her lighter, the Bishop stepped away from the lamp-post, rubbing the warm blood back into his hands.

And then, as Merrily’s lighter flared, so did bigger lights – flashing white and orange and wild blue, bouncing from pale walls and darkened windows.

10 Leave God Out of It

THE ROAD HAD already been closed below Ludford Bridge, which explained the sparseness of traffic on Broad Street.

Not so sparse, though, at the bottom of the hill, where there had once been mills and the distinctive Horseshoe Weir sent the River Teme rushing over flat rocks – a beauty spot on the edge of town, now a garish confluence of hysterical light: an ambulance, police cars, blue beacons still revolving, inviting an audience like bleak neon.

‘Road accident, looks like,’ Bernie Dunmore said. ‘Funny we didn’t hear it happen. Better turn back, I suppose. Last thing they need is—’

‘Andy.’ In the full-beam headlights of a static vehicle, Merrily could see the stocky figure climbing over the lower wall towards the river. ‘Down there, look, by those—’

Two policemen were going after Mumford, close to the shimmering sheet of the river.

‘Poor chap can’t seem to walk away from it, can he?’ the Bishop said.

But Merrily was already running down the hill, the throbbing voice inside her chest keeping time with her pounding feet, going, No… no… no… no…

They were bringing him back over the wall, one pushing him to the other who’d leapt over onto the pavement, Andy shouting, ‘Don’t you stupid bastards ever listen?’

The cops had an arm each. At the side of the road, a third shone his torch on them.

‘Andy? Andy Mumford?’

‘Get them off me!’

‘It’s all right, boys,’ the third cop said. ‘Who told you?’

‘Small town, Steve.’ Mumford shaking them off, brushing at his arms where they’d gripped him.

‘Did you see…?’

‘Didn’t get a chance, did I?’ In the torchlight Mumford’s face was smooth and cold, like washed grey stone. ‘These cretins—’ He looked up, saw Merrily. ‘Mrs Watkins.’

‘Andy, what’s—?’

‘Better go and make sure, hadn’t you?’ the third cop said.

Merrily found herself following Mumford over the wall, nobody blocking his way now they knew who he was. It was a longer drop the other side than she’d been expecting, and she stumbled, Mumford catching her arm.

‘Couple of neighbours waiting for me outside the house, with Dad. One was walking his dog by the river when he seen these boys come out of the pub by the bridge and go wading into the water.’

The policeman called Steve came alongside.

‘Can’t believe this, Andy.’

Mumford said nothing. They reached another cop and two paramedics in luminous jackets. There was a stretcher, and two wide-beam lamps were sparing them nothing. Merrily looked once and then turned away, fists tightening, watching the moonlit river washing under Ludford Bridge, hearing the hard questions, the terse replies.

‘No mistake, Andy?’

‘No.’ Mumford moving round the body. ‘No other injuries?’

‘Not that we can see.’

The swab of froth on Phyllis Mumford’s mouth had made it look as if she’d swallowed soap. Had made it seem, at first, like she was still alive, blowing bubbles. The bandage on her leg had been hanging loose, like a pennant.

Mumford grunted, hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched.

‘Nothing anybody could’ve done,’ Steve said.

‘Didn’t go off the bridge, then?’

‘Be more damaged, wouldn’t she, Andy? Looks like she got over that wall, same way we just came in, just started wading out from the bank and then slipped on the rocks. Anybody’d fall over in a minute, in the daytime even. No chance at all at night, see.’

‘Not at her age.’

‘No. What can any of us say? If those boys had got there five minutes earlier… I’m real sorry, mate.’

‘Aye.’

Merrily turned, and Mumford was there. They walked back slowly towards the wall, Mumford clearly coping with it the only way he knew how – like he hadn’t retired and this was someone else’s mother. Someone else’s mother, someone else’s nephew, someone else’s life.

‘Cold water,’ he said. ‘They always reckon a heart attack gets them first.’

‘I’m sure it… must,’ she said. ‘Andy—’

‘A mercy. Under the circumstances.’

‘—Why? Why would she come out in the dark, on her own?’

‘You tell me.’

‘This is just…’ Standing there, stupidly shaking her head. ‘I should’ve…’

Didn’t know what she should’ve done. This was altogether beyond comprehension.

‘My fault, ennit?’ Mumford said. ‘Should’ve noticed the way she was going. Should’ve had her assessed. Couldn’t expect the ole feller to see it, he en’t noticed her for years.’ His arm came back and he smashed his right fist into his left palm. ‘Christ!’

‘It’s not…’ She caught his arm on the rebound. ‘It’s not your fault.’

‘Look, Mrs Watkins, I got a long night…’ He turned away. ‘Long night ahead of me.’

Sounding like what he was really talking about was the rest of his life.

Someone helped Merrily back over the wall: the Bishop.

‘Saw a chap I knew. Merrily, this is beyond all—’

‘Aye,’ Mumford said, calm again, as if that one slam of the fist had been like a pressure valve.

‘Andrew. Look… where’s your father?’

‘One of the cars, last I seen. With Zoë – policewoman. Dunno which one it is.’

‘I’ll find it. I’ll talk to him.’

‘Only I’d leave God out of it, if I were you, Bishop,’ Mumford said and turned to Merrily. ‘These accidents will happen, won’t they? Ole women shouldn’t play by the river at night.’

Merrily thought, Accident?

As they stepped onto the pavement, several people were trailing past and, as they faded into the lights, she saw that they were wearing old-fashioned evening dress, two women in long black frocks and two men in tailcoats and top hats. She thought of posh restaurants, the new and affluent Ludlow, Phyllis Mumford dying alone, on the edge of all this.

‘Need to call the wife.’ Mumford had his mobile out. ‘Pick up the ole feller, take him back to our place.’

‘I could—’

‘I’ll see to him. You get off home.’

She wanted to scream, For God’s sake, you’re not a copper now, you’re one of us!

‘Come over to the car, Andy,’ Steve the policeman said. ‘We better sit down, sort some things out.’

Merrily was left alone. The party in evening dress had stopped, gazing down to where a knot of police and paramedics were concealing the body. They were not what she’d thought, these decadent revellers. A ruby glistened like a bubble of blood in the cleft of the chin of one of the women and one of the men in top hats wore eye make-up and his hat had ribbons hanging behind, like an old-fashioned undertaker.

‘Come on…’ A policewoman came over, arms spread wide. ‘Don’t hang around, please.’

‘Is she dead?’ one of the girls said, like she was asking about the time of the last bus.

‘You can read about it tomorrow. Come on.’

‘I won’t be here tomorrow.’

‘Good,’ the policewoman said.

‘Was it suicide?’

This was an older, quieter voice. Merrily saw that there was a fifth person in the group, this woman wrapped in a grey cape so long that it was touching the pavement.

The policewoman said, ‘Do you have anything to tell us about this incident, madam?’

The woman smiled faintly, with a shake of the head, as the blue beacon light passed over her face, brushing like a strobe effect over an eagle nose and causing a glistening like hoar frost in hair that was like strands of tarnished tinsel. And Merrily recognized her. Partly from Mumford’s description, but mainly…

Pale arms outstretched, fingers clawed, sleeves of a black robe slipping back. A copper bangle like a snake…

Merrily froze, hands clasped, catching a long-ago devilish reflection of herself in a mirror: white lipstick and a black velvet hat and mascara caked on like chocolate. Heard her own mother, appalled: You’re not walking out of this house looking like that…

‘No, I thought not,’ the policewoman said. ‘So would you mind not blocking the footpath, please?’

She’s quite distinctive, Mr Osman had said, with the varying colours of her hair and the way she dresses.

And then Andy Mumford in the car: If her name turns out to be Marion, what we gonner be looking at then?

From what Merrily could remember, her name had never been Marion.

She saw Mumford getting into the back of a police car with his friend Steve, heard the church clock strike almost softly. Ten o’clock and all so very far from well.

She stood in the middle of the road, the dog collar under the zipped-up fleece tight to her throat like a stiff admonishment. Furious at herself for failing to foresee something like this and, to a lesser extent, at Saltash whose flip diagnosis had probably been right, although it could be no more proven now than the existence of ghosts.

11 Nightshades

MERRILY DIDN’T FEEL any better in the morning, Sunday. She awoke with the light and lay watching the red dawn surfing the ceiling, where the oak beams were like beach barriers. Wondering what difference it would make to a suicidal world if she just didn’t bother to get up.

Unless anyone specifically asked, she hadn’t been in Ludlow last night, and neither had Bernie Dunmore. They’d agreed this as she dropped him, around one a.m., at the Bishop’s palace in Hereford.

Bernie had told her about his time with Reg Mumford. He’d taken Reg to the Angel, in Broad Street. ‘As a damn bishop, you get out of it,’ Bernie said. ‘Out of real people. You’ve forgotten the conclusions you once came to about what this job’s about – not preaching, just pure, concentrated listening.’

In the bar, he said, Reg had been remembering his wife as she used to be and a lot of other people Bernie didn’t know. Memories dripping into the beer, most of them from a long time ago.

Reg hadn’t mentioned his wife’s death – as if that was something he wasn’t yet ready to process, Bernie said.

As for Robbie, Reg didn’t understand how the boy had come to get himself killed, didn’t see any use dwelling on it. Kids did daft things, and sometimes they ran out of luck, and that boy… face it, he wasn’t entirely normal. Reg never knew how to talk to him, never had since he was little. Phyllis, however…

Reg had been trying to lose himself in daytime telly. Looking up every so often and seeing Phyllis gazing into the mirror, where she’d found a new channel of her own: the Robbie Channel. Robbie still sitting scrunched up over the table, drawing his black and white buildings, hands all black with charcoal – holding up his hands, Phyllis said, and grinning at her through the mirror. Phyllis weeping through her mad world, which had reflections of Robbie everywhere. Sometimes trailing aimlessly around the shops – Reg embarrassed, striding ahead, then looking back and seeing Phyllis staring in some window. Look, there he is again… do you see him? Reg buying her bits of things in the shops – it was only money – but when they got home the packages were never opened.

Would have destroyed Reg, too, if he’d given in to it. But Reg had seen too much death in his time, and he’d lost all patience with her – only so much a man could take. It was Reg who, in a fury, had turned the mirror to the wall before the Bishop came, because he hadn’t wanted the Bishop to see Phyllis going insane. Only it hadn’t been the Bishop at all, it had been Andy and some strangers and Reg didn’t want to meet any more strangers. This bloody smiley feller coming up to him in the street, all chatty, then asking who his doctor was – what right did they have, treating you like a kid?

Merrily got out of bed and knelt under the window, with its view over the village towards wooded Cole Hill, under a shiny salmon sky, and prayed for Reg and whatever remained of Phyllis and Robbie. When she stood up, her eyes were wet, and she found herself thinking, irrationally, of Lol and had this image of herself running down the drive and across the cobbles in her nightdress and banging on the cottage door, screaming, Let me in! for all the village to hear.

At breakfast, Jane said, ‘Mum, you look like sh—’

‘I know, all right?’

‘You turn up for Communion looking like that, they’ll all lose their faith.’

‘Oh hell, what time is it? And what are you doing up so early?’

‘Just curious about why you were out so late. On the other hand’ – Jane put a pensive forefinger to her chin – ‘if you were to turn up at the altar in your dressing gown, a soupçon dés-habillé, it might bring in more blokes, and— You’re not in the mood, are you? What’s happened?’

‘The elderly lady.’ Merrily brought her mug of tea and sat down opposite Jane, morning sunlight piercing the top window, over the sink. ‘The woman Saltash and I were supposed to be helping? She drowned herself last night in the River Teme.’

Jane blinked. ‘Mumford’s mother?’

‘Must have happened while we were no more than half a mile away, talking to a bloke who saw Robbie Walsh fall. Her lying in the water, us theorizing about some bloody stupid old ghost story and wondering—’

‘What old ghost—?’

‘Not important. No more important than me going on to the Bishop about Saltash and Callaghan-Clarke and feeling sorry for myself.’

‘Oh God, Mum…’

‘Deliverance – the fourth emergency service. Have to laugh, don’t you, flower?’

‘I’m not laughing. Was she, you know… confused?’

‘We always assume that, don’t we? That’s what everybody would have assumed last Christmas if Lol hadn’t got to Alice Meek before the cold did. But even if Mumford’s mum was on the slide, there might have been a part of her I could have got through to, with perseverance. And I didn’t really try.’

‘But you did try. You pressured the Bishop into going back with you because he was an old mate of the Mumfords.’

‘Putting the responsibility on someone else.’ Merrily’s head felt congested; she found a tissue in her dressing-gown pocket, blew her nose. ‘Should have tried harder, instead of half-thinking, Yeah, Saltash could be right, this is probably more his show than mine. I don’t know, maybe I just—’

‘Mum, don’t keep doing this to yourself. You did what you thought was best at the time. You always do. So just, like, finish your tea, have a wash, brush your hair, get your kit and… off to work.’

Merrily looked at the kid, who was no longer a kid, and dug out a smile from somewhere.

‘There you go,’ Jane said. ‘Why, there could be as many as, like, four people in that church, just gasping for Holy Communion. Get down there and give ’em… wine.’

So she got through it. No big state of eucharistic grace, no all-enveloping peace, but she got through Holy Communion and Morning Worship – doing the sermon about listening to old people, the real meaning of honouring your father and mother. Not very convincing, really, and she was having problems staying focused. When she closed her eyes, she saw Phyllis Mumford’s drowned face and heard her wispy, untethered voice: Now then… I know who you are… I know who you are now, my dear.

Back in the scullery, she rang Lol, explaining about last night. About the two women who had faded into the picture, one dead, one on the streets of Ludlow in a full-length cape, accompanied by younger people in decadent goth costumes. The shock of recognition.

‘Belladonna?’ Lol said. ‘Are you sure?’

Just after lunch – priests always knew when other priests were most likely to surface on a Sunday – Siân Callaghan-Clarke rang. She’d heard about Phyllis Mumford from Nigel Saltash, who’d heard it on the radio.

‘It’s terrible, but I’m afraid Nigel wasn’t entirely surprised. There’s an area psychiatric support team that ought to have been told about Mrs Mumford. But human resources are terribly stretched these days, largely as a result of increasing addiction problems. Awfully sad, though, because Nigel was going to talk to their GP first thing tomorrow.’

‘Was he?’

‘But thank heavens, Merrily… thank heavens, in a way, that you didn’t take it any further.’

‘Sorry?’

‘From a Deliverance point of view. When you think of the kind of adverse publicity if the media had discovered that you’d performed what they would have seen as some sort of exorcistic rite at this poor woman’s house just hours before she died.’

‘A home-blessing?’

‘It’s not what’s been done, Merrily—’

‘A few prayers?’

‘—It’s who’s done it. You’ve become fairly widely known now, not least to certain sections of the media, as an exorcist. Certain people would put two and two together and make six.’

‘But suppose that – after this exorcistic rite – it hadn’t happened. Suppose Mrs Mumford hadn’t wandered into the river. Was therefore still alive…’

But then she had done it. She’d returned, behind Saltash’s back, and done her rudimentary blessing, and Mrs Mumford had still died.

‘We could play the “what-if” game for the rest of the day, Merrily,’ Siân said, ‘but I doubt exorcism has ever been hailed as a cure for senile dementia.’

‘So, do you think it’s time for me to quit, Siân, before I bring the Church into even more disrepute?’

‘Let’s not be silly,’ Siân said.

Sunday evening, the Bishop rang. Something he thought Merrily should know.

‘Old Reg Mumford phoned me today. Encouraging, really, that he was able to do that.’

‘How is he?’

‘Staying at his son’s house, but insisting on going home tomorrow. He… seemed more focused. And resigned. And in his resignation, behind the loss, one could almost sense, I’m afraid, an exhausted kind of relief. Said he knew Phyllis would never have come to terms with what had happened to Robbie, however long she lived.’

Merrily was taking the call on her mobile, alone in the church, preparing for the Quiet Service. She lowered herself to the edge of a pew opposite the west window, where the evening sun made a ruby in the apple held by Eve.

‘You mean he’d actually thought she might want to die?’

‘Not exactly,’ Bernie said. ‘She was so convinced the boy was still there, in the town, that Reg said he was half-expecting to hear she’d been knocked down in the traffic after spotting Robbie across the road or something and rushing to him.’

‘His… reflection.’

‘Reflections. Exactly. Look… ah… Reg said that, in happier times, he and Phyllis often used to walk by the river. And one fine evening last week, she got him to take her back there.’

‘Oh no.’ Merrily closed her eyes.

‘And it was early evening, and the water was fairly still, even so close to the Horseshoe Weir, and she went and stood near the wall, looking down. And of course…’

‘Robbie.’

‘Looking up at her from the water.’

‘Oh God.’

‘Reg couldn’t take it. He pulled her away. They walked home in silence, nothing to say to one another. The last thing she said to him last night – therefore the last thing she said to him ever – was, “I can’t feel him in here any more. You’ve driven him out.” ’

‘Meaning the mirror – turning it to the wall?’

‘Who knows? And then she walked out, and she was standing at the front of the house, and he could hear her talking to one of the neighbours for a while. When he looked for her, she wasn’t there.’

‘He didn’t tell you this last night?’

‘I think he had to get it clear in his own mind. Anyway, thought I should tell you, that’s all. So that we can draw a line under it, as it were.’

Merrily heard soft footsteps, opened her eyes to the sight of Lol padding into the aisle. Sometimes he’d come to the Quiet Service, though never any of the others. He was wearing his old Roswell-alien sweatshirt. He’d worn this in church before, possibly a signal that he wasn’t yet fully integrated.

‘You really think a line can be drawn, Bernie?’

‘I think we have to. This Marion business… that’s always going to be a mystery.’

‘Why have you never told me about that before?’

‘Didn’t seem relevant. And anyway—’

‘You mean, not relevant to, like, what I do?’

‘Put it this way,’ he said, ‘you’re the only person I’ve ever told. Including the friends who got to keep their ten quid. And I trust you’ll keep it to yourself. Are you in the church, Merrily?’

‘You want me to swear on the Bible, over the phone? Sorry. Yes, I’m just rearranging the furniture.’

Lol was pulling movable pews up to the front to set up a rough circle.

‘Ah,’ the Bishop said. ‘Your meditation service. That going all right?’

‘We just call it the Quiet Service now. Yeah, going very well, since we managed to cool the rumours of miracle healing. We’ll do prayers for specific people sometimes, but strictly no hands-on. I know my level. We get about twenty most weeks.’

Including Jane, occasionally, and now even Lol.

Merrily beckoned him down the aisle and into the vestry, soon to be converted into a gift shop. Its walls had been freshly painted in yellow and some cheap pine shelving had been fitted. A faded Victorian sofa, now looking for a new home, had been pushed against the wall under a window, and Lol sat on that.

‘Well, this is nice, but wouldn’t it be some kind of sacrilege?’

‘I just want to talk, you fool.’ Merrily shut the door behind them.

‘Sacrilege could have been exciting.’ Lol lifted his hands. ‘Kidding.’

‘I know.’

Couple of years ago, the church organist had openly fantasized about slowly unbuttoning Merrily’s cassock. Lol, however, after the experience with his parents, was still wary of the Church and its trappings. Another reason he preferred the Quiet Service, when Merrily wore only her pectoral cross over a dark sweater and jeans.

‘So,’ she said. ‘Belladonna?’

‘You could be right.’ Lol sat forward, hands on his knees. ‘I rang Prof. He said he’d been warned a few months ago that she was living in the area and possibly working on a new album. Consequently, he was putting it around that the studio was booked up for the foreseeable.’

‘She’s not changed, then?’

‘Don’t go there,’ Lol said.

‘Hey, I’ve been there. When I was Jane’s age, it would have been. It was at a wrestling stadium – she wasn’t very famous then, but she had a cult following. We all wore black tights for the gig and I had this kind of funeral coat I’d bought for a couple of quid from Oxfam, and a black velvet hat and a lot of cheap stage makeup. Thank God all the pictures have disappeared.’

‘You really were a goth?’

‘A phase. We all linked arms under the stage and stood very still, like mourners around a catafalque. I didn’t like the music that much, to be honest. Too slow, a bit dismal. Occasional bursts of hysterical screaming. No tunes to speak of.’

‘What does she look like these days?’

‘Hardly any different. This long grey Victorian kind of cape that trailed in the mud. Same slightly beaky nose, same slightly crooked teeth.’

‘But in an attractive way. That strange kind of uneven beauty,’ Lol said.

‘Mmm.’ She tossed him a suspicious look. ‘So how close did you get all those years ago?’

He smiled. ‘Nice of you to imply I might have been brave enough at eighteen. No, we once played a very badly organized one-day festival in this half-flooded field in Oxfordshire. We were near the bottom of the bill – eleven a.m. – and she was in the prime sunset spot. We didn’t actually stay for her gig. But I did hear the discussion she had with the organizers about the level of facilities. Scary.’

‘Formidable woman.’

‘Hadn’t realized she was so posh until then. You don’t expect it. No, I never actually met her. She…’ Lol’s gaze had turned watchful. ‘She came down to the river last night because she’d heard there’d been a death?’

‘She asked a policewoman if it was a suicide. I thought that was a curious question. Suggested she knew who it was. Or maybe I was just thinking that because I realized this was probably the woman seen with Robbie Walsh. She certainly knew where he lived because Mumford saw her standing outside the house. Ironically, we were going to ask Mrs Mumford if she knew this odd woman personally. Thought that might solve something.’

Merrily could hear voices and footsteps from the nave. And laughter, which was good.

‘This gig I went to,’ she said, ‘when I was seventeen – the band were all dressed as undertakers and they wheeled Belladonna on stage in a coffin, on a bier.’

Remembering the album: Nightshades. Fairly sure she didn’t have it any more, or Jane would have found it. Maybe that was why she’d got rid of it. On the cover, Belladonna had been sitting in some kind of dusty chapel cradling a mandolin like a baby, a strap of her dress pulled down as if she was about to breastfeed the instrument. Subtly profane.

‘This guy you spoke to,’ Lol said. ‘He said the woman’s name was Mrs Pepper?’

‘Mmm.’

‘Prof told me Belladonna was married at one time to her producer, Saul Pepper.’

‘That’s it, then. I’ll phone Andy Mumford when I get home and confirm it.’

Whatever her connection was with Robbie Walsh, Mumford would find it. If you wanner stick with this ghost stuff, mabbe I’ll check out the real woman. The living woman. His mother’s drowning was hardly going to make his inquiries more restrained.

‘Lol…’ He was leaning back on the Victorian sofa, exposing the big-eyed alien on his sweatshirt. Lol the former psychiatric patient, drop-out psychology student. ‘You were an imaginative kid, right?’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘Did you never fall in love with someone who didn’t exist? Seriously.’

‘With me, it was always serious.’ Lol stood up. ‘Even the real ones, you turn them into something that doesn’t exist. You start with a beautiful face and you build around it something that might actually love you.’

She told him about Robbie Walsh and Marion de la Bruyère.

Lol said, ‘If he saw Ludlow as a refuge from something very bad… It was the end of the holidays, wasn’t it, when he died?’

‘Virtually.’

‘Maybe he really couldn’t bear to go back this time. Maybe he just wanted to stay with Marion.’

‘Suicide? Mumford’s given no indication that his home life was that bad.’

‘Everything can seem very closed-in at that age,’ Lol said. ‘The future’s like staring down the wrong end of a telescope. You can’t envisage anything more than a few months ahead, at most, and if you’re having a very difficult time you don’t see a way out, ever.’

‘He killed himself in Ludlow, dying the way she died, because that was the only way he could stay there?’

She looked into Lol’s eyes. Lol shrugged.

Slipping back into the nave for the Quiet Service, Merrily was trying to see this unlikely triangle: Robbie, Marion, Belladonna. The kid’s connection with a 1980s goth rock singer was the hardest to envisage.

‘Frankly,’ Lol whispered in the vestry doorway, ‘if it turns out he was suicidal, I can think of more suitable people to administer counselling.’

12 Esoteric

MERRILY SOMEHOW SENSED it and looked up maybe half a second before it was dismissed… and Sophie’s face was blank again.

Outside the gatehouse office window, muscular clouds were hanging over Hereford like a street gang closing in. Maybe it was the sudden darkening of the room that had caused her to raise her head; nothing to do with Sophie, the only person she knew who could convey disapproval without any change of expression – probably went with her breeding.

‘What’s wrong, Soph?’

‘I’m sorry?’

Sophie looked up from her computer. She was wearing a dark red woollen suit over a cream silk blouse. The Bishop of Hereford’s lay secretary over many years and several bishops. Worth her weight in pearls.

‘You scowled,’ Merrily said.

‘I don’t think so, Merrily.’

There was a muttering of thunder from Dinedor Hill or somewhere. Merrily got up from her desk. On Mondays she usually tried to come in for a couple of hours to review the Deliverance schedule, although lately there hadn’t been much of one. She was late today because of the afternoon cremation. A difficult funeral: people she hadn’t known before, and so it was all the more important to make it resonate. Huw wasn’t the only Deliverance minister to suggest that cursory, conveyor-belt funerals were leading to disquiet on both sides of the grave.

‘I’d better put the kettle on before the power goes.’

‘This isn’t Ledwardine, Merrily, the power isn’t going anywhere.’

‘It’s my turn, anyway.’

She filled the kettle and plugged it in, spooned tea into the pot then swiftly backed up and peered over Sophie’s shoulder at the computer. There was an e-mail in the frame.

Sophie, Re the ‘sample’ of Deliverance files that you mailed me this morning, this is not what I meant. I feel it is important that the whole team sees all correspondence before it is filed. I also think we should be able to access the database at all times of day, rather than having to trouble you during office hours. Please get back to me with your thoughts before close of

Sophie clicked it away.

‘Ah,’ Merrily said. ‘I see.’

Sophie gazed into the screen-saver photo of swans on the Wye, impossibly blue.

‘I tend to receive instructions most days from Canon Callaghan-Clarke.’

Outside the window, the sky was solid now, like a rock formation over Broad Street.

And, oh dear, you didn’t do this. You didn’t treat Sophie Hill as a servant. What you had to learn, if you wanted to avoid trouble in the workplace, was that Sophie served only the Cathedral.

‘And will you be getting back to her with your, er, thoughts?’

‘What do you suggest? For instance…’ Sophie went back into the e-mails. ‘Should I have sent her a copy of this?’

Happy Beltane, Ms Exorcist! Yes soon be Walpurgis Night!!! Why don’t you come out and let your hair down. ha ha ha.

( )

* I * Lucifer

‘This came through the website?’

‘Yesterday. When exactly is Beltane?’

‘April the thirtieth… Saturday? May Day Eve, anyway. When all card-carrying Satanists perform their blood sacrifices.’

‘Ah, yes. Probably mailed from an Internet café.’

‘Just some kid who’s learned how to construct a devil on the keyboard. With a website, you’re bound to get a percentage of this sort of crap.’

‘Unless, of course’ – Sophie looked up – ‘one decides to dispense with the facility.’

‘Scrap the message line? She wants to do that?’

‘The entire website, actually,’ Sophie said.

‘What?’

‘I’ve been asked, initially, to supply a list of all the e-mails it’s stimulated in the past year.’

Merrily went to the window, exchanging hard looks with the sky. This time, there had to be a mistake. The website was about offering straightforward advice to people experiencing problems they thought might be of paranormal origin. It included self-help procedures and useful prayers. It advised them to contact their local clergy if the problems persisted or, if they preferred to, e-mail, phone or write direct to this office.

She turned back to Sophie.

‘So how many people did contact us in the past year through the site?’

‘Not a great many. Perhaps thirty.’

‘And what percentage, would you say, were jokes or try-ons?’

‘I’d say about twenty per cent. A few were from children who genuinely thought they had a problem, but turned out to have seen too many episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. A couple came from Women’s Institutes asking if you could address their meetings. We had, I think, four from people thanking us for the prayers and the advice and saying they’d actually worked and they were now sleeping better – that sort of thing.’

‘And how many requiring follow-up action?’

‘Seven. Mainly poltergeist-related, all subsequently dealt with by the local clergy – prayer and counselling.’

‘It’s a substantial number, when you think about it, for a largely rural diocese. What exactly has Siân said?’

‘She said she’d placed the issue of the website on the agenda for the next meeting of the Deliverance Panel and, as I say, went on to ask for detailed background information as to the site’s usage.’

‘What do you think her argument’s going to be?’

‘I suspect she’s going to dismiss the whole thing as costly and trivial. If anyone wants this essentially… esoteric service badly enough, they’ll go to the trouble of finding us. Of course, I may be quite wrong—’

‘Esoteric – that was her word?’

‘Unless I misheard.’

‘So we’re minority stuff. They’re pushing us into a back room and switching the light out.’

‘Or possibly a cupboard,’ Sophie said.

‘If that website has saved just one faintly timid person from—’

‘You don’t have to convert me, Merrily.’

‘No.’

They looked at one another in the dimness of the afternoon. The kettle rumbled towards the boil, distant lightning glimmered. Merrily sat down at the desk, her back to the window, and switched on the lamp.

‘Sophie, what am I going to do about this bloody woman?’

This morning she’d phoned Huw Owen, leaving a message on his answering machine. He’d come back to her just after twelve when she was getting into her black coat for the funeral. He hadn’t found out very much and none of it was encouraging.

Except that there appeared to be no hidden agenda. No worthwhile conspiracy theory. No credible faction, in or out of Canterbury, with a mission to destroy Deliverance.

Which, of course, didn’t mean it wasn’t bubbling under, somewhere.

Huw told her what he’d learned about Siân Callaghan-Clarke: fifty-one years old, formerly a barrister – which would explain her need to work with professionals like Saltash, the resident expert witness. Born in Winchester to an upper-middle-class, High Church, landowning family.

‘Word is,’ Huw said, ‘that the father was a traditionalist. Her younger brother would have the career, Siân was expected to marry well, raise kids – women’s stuff.’

Not a good time to impose those values. Siân had not only not married well, she hadn’t married at all, moving to Worcester as a criminal barrister and managing to raise two sons inside a comfortably loose arrangement with her head of chambers. He was still around, still in Worcester, and the sons were both at Oxford.

The Church?

‘Well, it was in the family,’ Huw said. ‘Uncle became Bishop of Norwich. Her brother – who she appears to have resented from an early age – is now an archdeacon, Exeter or somewhere. Siân, commendably enough, began to help some of the youngsters she was defending and concluded that the Church had the facilities to operate a support network for addicts and suchlike and wasn’t using them. It’s not that simple – as I’ve just been finding out up in Manchester – but it was enough to get her involved. And that was the time when the battle for women priests was on, and her younger brother, apparently, was strongly anti.’

‘That would do it,’ Merrily said.

‘Oh aye. That were the red rag, all right. She’d get into the Church and she’d leave the brat behind.’

As a priest, Huw said, Siân was exactly what she seemed: a modernist and a politician. Known to be tolerant of Islamic fundamentalism while deploring its equivalent in Christianity. Suspicious of evangelism and Alpha training. Considered opposition to gay clerics to be irrational to the point of superstition.

Talking of which…

‘Aye, well… there were rumours of her having a bit of a thing in Worcester with a bloke I trained with, Keiran Winnard – younger than me, charismatic in all senses of the word. She’d certainly be his type: striking blonde, plenty of style and fancy footwork in debate. Liked a woman with a bit of intensity, Keiran, as I recall.’

‘Risky, though, in the Church. In the same diocese?’

‘Wouldn’t be the first. Pure physical attraction, not necessarily a meeting of minds. Anyway, it must have burnt through quickly enough, leaving her even less well disposed towards the miracle-and-wonder lads than before. Happen that was the reason she got out of Worcester. Or she just thought she could rise faster in Hereford – smaller pool, bit of an outpost. Either way, looks like Hereford’s got her for the foreseeable future. And so have you.’

‘So maybe she sees Deliverance as a method of exercising control,’ Merrily said to Sophie.

‘You mean, over the wilder elements within the diocese? The charismatics, the evangelicals?’

‘If you consider that, in certain hands, exorcism itself can be very rigid and repressive… keeping the lid on the cauldron, as someone once said. Taking a dim view of the Charismatic movement, arm-wavers, happy-clappies, speakers in tongues, because of what they might be opening themselves up to. Look at my predecessor. He hated all that.’

‘But from a different perspective, surely.’ Sophie leaned into the lamplight. ‘Canon Dobbs lived an ascetic life – self-denial, fasting, long hours of prayer. A deeply spiritual man. Bitterly opposed to women priests, as we know, and I have no doubts at all where he’d have stood on the issue of gay clergy.’

‘With his back to the altar and a big cross in front. You’re right, it works both ways. Rationalism can be even more repressive, in its way: all possession is mental illness, all ghosts are psychological projections. Siân is potentially more restrictive than Dobbs.’

‘Then why…’ Sophie pinched her chin, forefinger projecting pensively along her cheek. ‘Why would she want Martin Longbeach on the Panel? A… well, a tree-hugger.’

‘Window dressing, Huw reckons. I mean, he’s harmless, isn’t he? And gay. Probably an excellent source of information from the lunatic fringe. And doubtless so deeply honoured to be chosen that he’s more than happy to pass it on.’ Merrily smiled. ‘Is Siân a gay icon, do you think? Or maybe Martin’s being groomed as my successor…?’

The phone rang. Sophie snatched it quickly, probably to kill the image of Martin Longbeach here in this office with his thinking-candles and his herbal teas.

‘Gatehouse.’

Merrily heard a man’s voice on the line. Pale sheet-lightning brought the office up in shades of grey.

‘One moment, I’ll see if she’s in.’ Sophie covered the mouthpiece. ‘It’s former-Sergeant Mumford, are you—?’

‘Sure.’

She’d spoken to him very briefly last night, telling him about the woman who had proved to be Belladonna. It had meant nothing to Mumford, who said his knowledge of rock music began and ended with the Rolling Stones. Sophie passed the phone across the desk.

‘Andy, I was going to ring you tonight. How are—?’

‘You got a TV, switch it on.’ Mumford’s voice, flecked with storm crackle, also loaded with the kind of urgency you didn’t expect from him. ‘Just caught the headline, called you at home, your daughter said you’d be there. You got a television in the office?’

‘Well, we have…’

Looking up at the portable collecting dust on the filing cabinet.

‘Switch it on. Central News, it’s on now, don’t hang around. I’ll call you back.’

Thunder trundling, like a heavy goods vehicle over the horizon, as he hung up.