To Dream of the Dead

8 Viler Shades

The heating, such as it was, was due to kick in at seven, for a strict one and a half hours. A cost-of-oil thing. You could get twenty-five per cent of your fuel costs from the parish, for business use of the vicarage, but Merrily had never bothered. Stupid, probably, but too late to start now, at these prices. So she and Jane had cut back. Lost the old Aga, for a start.

Merrily moved rapidly around the kitchen, putting the kettle on, activating the toaster, feeding Ethel, and then running back into the hall, calling up from the bottom of the stairs.

‘Flower?’

Her lips could hardly frame the word, all the nerves in her face deadened by the cold. On the wall by the door, Jesus Christ looked down from Holman Hunt’s Light of the World with a certain empathy, obviously not drawing much heat from his lantern.

‘Jane!’

The kid was definitely up. She’d been wandering around at least half an hour ago. Probably trying for stealth, but when there were only the two of you in a big old vicarage you developed an ear for creaks.

No reply from up there, no sound of radio or running water. Merrily went back to the kitchen and cracked three eggs into a bowl. Tom Parson’s funeral was at eleven at Hereford Crem. Old Tom, local historian, one-time editor of the parish magazine, now the third village death in a fortnight. Another funeral, another empty cottage up for grabs at a crazy price, removal vans more common in this village now than buses.

The cold came for her again, and she went scurrying back into the hall.

‘Jane!’

Nothing. Merrily pulled her robe together and ran upstairs, two flights, to what Jane liked to call her apartment, in the attic. A big bedsit, essentially, with all the kid’s spooky books, her desk, her stereo, her CDs. The door was hanging open. Merrily snapped on the light and saw the duvet in a heap, one pillow on the floor.

What was this about? Jane waking up aggrieved because her craven parent hadn’t stood up at last night’s meeting and fought for Coleman’s Meadow? She hadn’t seemed annoyed last night, but Jane… one day she might become vaguely predictable, no signs of that yet.

Merrily sat on an edge of the bed, wondering what it would be like this time next year when Jane was gone. Was she really going to carry on here on her own? With Lol on his own in Lucy’s old house? If they put this place on the market, the Church could clean up. The Old Vicarage, Ledwardine, 17th century, seven bedrooms, guest-house potential. One day they’d do it, transfer the vicar to one of the estate houses, and on mornings like this it didn’t seem such a bad idea.

A videotape was projecting from the vintage VCR under Jane’s analogue TV. Give the kid her due, she’d never pined for home cinema — on a vicar’s stipend, still many years away.

The tape was labelled T-1 Feb. Recorded last winter, long before Jane had been drawn towards a career in archaeology. Trench One was never less than watchable but not exactly crucial viewing. Why this one now?

Oh, and you’ll never guess — the kid calling back casually over her shoulder as she went upstairs to bed last night — who’s going to be in charge of the dig. Merrily waiting in vain for a name, but Jane always liked suspense.

Activating the VCR and the TV, Merrily shoved in the tape and watched pre-credit shots of a sinister grey landcape under a sky tiered with clouds like stacked shelves.

A man appeared, solid, bulky, shot from below the tump he was standing on. Trench One had three regular presenters who took turns to direct an excavation, present a different viewpoint, argue over the results. It was about conflict and competition.

‘So we’ve studied the reports of the original 1963 dig…’

He was wearing some kind of bush shirt, with badges sewn on, an Army beret and jeans with ragged holes in the knees. In case anyone had any doubts, the caption spelled out:

‘… been over the geophysics, taken a stack of aerial pictures, and it now seems pretty clear to me that this is where we need to sink…’ Lavish grin splashing through smoky stubble. ‘Trench One!’

Blore jumping down from the tump and standing for a moment rubbing his hands like he couldn’t wait to get into the soil, and then the sig tune coming up in a storm of thrash-metal as he slid on his dark glasses and people began to gather around him.

Young people, his students. Trench One had begun as an Open University programme on BBC 2. Very rapidly acquiring a cult following, which built and built until they gave it peak screening. The format had altered slightly: Blore as guru, channelling youthful vigour. Merrily recalled a profile in one of the Sunday magazines describing him as genial, profane and disarmingly intolerant.

She stopped the tape. Red herring, surely. No way would Coleman’s Meadow be put into the hands of the man who’d told BBC Midlands Today that anyone who thought the Bronze Age builders of the Dinedor Serpent were primitive obviously hadn’t met the philistines running Herefordshire Council.

Wondering how genial, profane and disarmingly intolerant might translate.

‘What do you think, Lucy?’

She looked up at the framed photo over a stack of Jane’s esoteric books. An elderly woman in her winter poncho. The wide-brimmed hat throwing a tilted shadow across bird-of-prey features blurred by the process of turning away. Jane had found the picture in the vestry files and cleaned it up, had copies made and framed the original.

The only known portrait of Lucy Devenish who, like the old Indian warriors she’d so resembled, had probably thought cameras could steal your soul.

Merrily thought the picture looked unusually grey and flat this morning, lifeless.

The river was still frothing like cappuccino in the lamplight, but at least he wasn’t going anywhere new.

And the rain had eased. There was some ground mist, but the sky was clearing. Looking up, Jane saw the morning star pulsing like a distant lamp.

A breathing space. She walked slowly back up Church Street towards the square. Most of the guys at school hated getting up in the morning, but she’d never found it a problem. Around dawn you were more receptive to… impressions.

Was that weird? Was she weird? Over the last couple of years, she’d done all the usual stuff — been totally hammered on cider, got laid — but somehow it wasn’t enough. Was she alone at Moorfield High in thinking it wasn’t enough?

Probably.

There were very few lights in Church Street, none in Lucy’s old house where Lol lived now. Sometimes, pre-dawn, you’d see him by lamplight, working on a song for his second solo album, at his desk under the window. But Lol had been at the meeting with Mum, listening to Pierce’s New Ledwardine bullshit, which was enough to sap anybody’s creativity.

A breeze blundered into the square, ripping away the mist like a lace-curtain and rattling the stacks of morning papers barricading the doorway of the Eight Till Late. The only sign of life. Not long ago, even in the bleak midwinter, you’d have had clinking milk bottles and the warm aroma of baking bread. Preparations for a day. Now even the morning post wouldn’t be here for hours, and the milk came in plastic bottles in the supermarkets, and soon nobody would be seen on the streets of Ledwardine until about ten when the dinky delicatessen opened for croissants.

Jane stopped on the edge of the square and looked out, over the crooked, 16th-century black and white houses and shuttered shops, towards Cole Hill, the first point of contact with each new day. Hearing Mum again, from last night.

I won’t dress this up, flower. When the stones are exposed and studied or measured or whatever happens, they want them taken away. Possibly erected somewhere else. Or… not erected.

This was Lyndon Pierce plus transient scum like Ward Savitch, of pheasant-holocaust fame. Mum had admitted she’d managed to say nothing; as the meeting was supposed to be for public information only, the words powder and dry had seemed appropriate. Jane was aware of trembling.

The church clock said 6.30, just gone. Still a while off daylight, and Mum wouldn’t be up for another half-hour. Jane walked under the lych-gate and into the churchyard, switching on her lamp, cutting an ochre channel through the mist which put ghostly wreaths around the graves.

The beam seemed to find its own way to the only stone with a quotation from Thomas Traherne:

Jane knelt. If she was late for breakfast, late for school, it didn’t matter. This was important. This was the person to whom she’d have to answer if the village lost its ancient heart.

‘Lucy,’ she whispered to the headstone, ‘the bastards want to have them ripped out. Put on a flatbed truck and taken away.’

Sometimes, when she was on her own in the early morning or at twilight, calm and focused, she’d almost see Lucy Devenish, eagle-faced and huddled in her poncho on the edge of some folkloric otherworld.

‘So, like, if there’s anything you can do?’

She’d been coming here every day for weeks now, far longer than she’d been going to the river. Talking to Lucy, keeping her up to date. It was important.

Jane looked up to see only steeple, mist and morning star, felt damp seeping through the knees of her jeans. She stood up, on the edge of the old coffin path along which the dead of Ledwardine had once been carried.

As she walked away, there was a tiny sound like a snapping twig on the path to her left, as if someone was walking beside her. Only some small mammal, but it made her smile as she set off along the ancient trackway which would later proceed, in perfect alignment with the gateways at each end of Coleman’s Meadow, to the Iron Age camp on Cole Hill.

It was like you were walking the border between worlds. Walking with ghosts. Could be down to Bill Blore, now, to stop the sacrilege, let Lucy walk in peace.

A voice came bubbling in the soggy air.

It said, ‘Who’s Lucy?’

Lol lay listening to the gunslinger wind prowling Church Street. Scared now. For a couple of days after London, it had been simple bewilderment and gratitude to whatever had got him through it. But this morning he’d awoken into darkness, the swaggering wind, anxiety.

Five days ago now, London, and reduced to a dream-sequence. Last night, to put it in its place, he’d been set on doing something real. Like maybe standing up and laying into Lyndon Pierce, this bastard who last summer had said to him, If certain people who en’t local don’t like the way we do things round yere, seems to me they might think about moving on.

Moving on? In London for just two days, Lol had been semi-paralysed by a fear of not getting back.

He looked up at the oak beam over the bed, thinking about its permanence, how it had become stronger with age. How, if you tried to bang a nail into it now, the nail would snap off.

A lot like the woman who used to live here.

But how unlike either the woman or the beam he was.

Remembering the routine cowardice assailing him as he’d climbed on the stool with his guitar to do ‘Baker’s’ in the big BBC studio, surrounded by an audience top-heavy with real musicians. Superstitiously sure he was going to fail because he was playing the Takamine rather than the ill-fated Boswell.

I want to know about everything, Jane had demanded when he finally did get home. Everything and everybody.

Lol had said they’d probably view the performance and then decide to lose him from the final edit. Jane had looked sinister. ‘Only if Holland and his producer want to be stalked for the rest of their lives by a vicar’s psychotic daughter with a machete.’

He’d smiled and told her everything. Everything he could remember about his big day out in the big city, recording ‘The Baker’s Lament’ for BBC 2’s flagship music programme, Later With Jools Holland. The New Year’s Eve programme. Hadn’t realised until he was in the studio that this was the one where they all had to feign excitement as the hands of the big clock closed in on midnight and the pipers waded in. A producer had said they’d have to do it live next year, in line with the BBC’s new drive towards truth and honesty.

Lol had been the cameo act, of course, the one-song guy — the big stars did three numbers — but it had been preceded, unexpectedly, by an interview with Jools. The great man decently glossing over Lol’s weird years, before screening a 30-second clip from the award-winning independent film about the death of village life, for which Lol’s music was the soundtrack. The micro-budget movie that was turning ‘The Baker’s Lament’ into a fluke Christmas minor hit, turning Lol’s long-dormant career around.

What he remembered most about the actual recording was not the cameras, or the one chord-change his fingers fluffed, but a bunch of people in the studio audience, swaying and mouthing the words of the chorus:

One of the mouthers, unless he’d imagined all this, had been Michael Stipe of REM, benignly smiling and inclining his long bony head. Jane had been wildly impressed. Lol, too, at the time, obviously. Before it was all put into a hard perspective by his next clear memory, of a guy approaching him afterwards, explaining that he was putting together an American tour for Original Sin and how would Lol feel about being considered for the support?

Five weeks, in the spring, the guy said. Someone else, who he’d declined to name, had pulled out, so they’d need to know fairly soon if Lol was up for it.

Five weeks.

All Lol remembered about his own response was,

‘I’m thirty-nine.’

The guy laughing and slapping him on the shoulder, telling him that America didn’t have an ageism problem on anywhere near the scale of Britain’s and, anyway, Lol looked younger, and the Sin guys loved his music. Adding, with unmoving eyes, ‘You may never get a time like this again. You know what I mean by a time? When the right people know your songs?

Lol hadn’t told Merrily. Whatever she really felt, she’d be twisting his arm to go for it. Fifteen years ago, if he hadn’t, at the time, been a guest of the psychiatric health system, he’d have signed the contract before he left the capital.

Now he thought only about the wearying cycle of soundchecks and encores curtailed because the audience had paid to see the act that came next. Bars and towns, towns and bars that all looked the same, clapboard motels with sunken beds and rusty showers.

Plus, there was a message on his answering machine from Barry at the Black Swan. Need an answer today, Lol. Before lunchtime, preferably. I can get posters done in a couple of hours, but I need to know.

Unnerved, Lol rolled out of bed, went to the window.

He was panting.

He looked across the narrowing street to the matching black and white timber-framed 17th-century terrace with its winter-empty window boxes and the holly wreaths on its front doors and a few lights still on, more than usual because half of the houses were holiday homes now, coming alive for Christmas.

Lol turned, his face against the wet glass, to see the front garden of the vicarage and…

… Merrily, in jeans and a big sweater, looking up and down the dripping street in the half-light, as if she’d lost something. Her face soft and pale, hair over her eyes.

Lol just wanted to run down and hold her.

The condensation was cold on his cheek.

Merrily. Merrily and the songs. Nothing else. OK, maybe occasional gigs to keep your hand in and your mortgage payments met, your professional confidence afloat.

You only had one life and his was half gone and if he couldn’t spend all of the rest of it with the woman who’d really turned him around, what was the point?

You know what I mean by a time? When the right people know your songs?

Lol looked up at the oak beam. How old? Four hundred years? Longer, maybe twice as long, because it had been a tree, born into red Welsh Border soil.

The guy had been wrong.

The right people didn’t know his songs.

He’d toured a wide area of western Britain, but not within ten miles of this village. All the times Barry at the Black Swan had invited him to do a gig, and Lol had backed off.

Because, apart from Barry, nobody who lived here had ever acknowledged what he did. None of the locals, none of the incomers. He doubted anyone in Ledwardine had ever bought his solo album and certainly not anything he’d done years ago with Hazey Jane.

A cold audience. He’d played twice, in the past year, to cold audiences. He’d played in bars where they carried on drinking and chatting amongst themselves. He’d played one pub where a dozen people had carried their drinks outside because they couldn’t hear themselves laugh. It hadn’t mattered that much; he just wouldn’t go back there again.

But this… was where he lived. In Lucy’s old house — there should be a blue plaque outside. This was where he wrote the songs that were so much a part of who he was. That, in some ways, were all that he was. If he said no to Barry, it was cowardice. Ledwardine would have good reason to despise him.

But if he said yes, and Ledwardine despised him…

Lol saw Merrily looking down the street directly towards this window, and pulled his face away, stood clutching the wooden sill with both hands while the west wind rattled the panes as if it was trying to shake some sense into him.

The whining of the wind seeming to echo Councillor Pierce.

Grow or die.

9 Where the Dead Walk

Two women in a graveyard before dawn… this was not the kind of encounter you could easily walk away from. A sense of déjà vu had thrown Jane off balance, but she kept on walking along the side of the church, the woman and the wind keeping pace with her.

‘Been out every morning for about a week or something,’ the woman said, ‘and there hasn’t been anything much in the way of decent light at all. Rather hoping today was going to be the breakthrough. No chance.’

Jane’s lamplight had found the costly lustre of a big camera with a fat lens, the kind of kit that made Eirion’s prized SLR look like a budget disposable from Tesco.

‘Yeah.’ She looked up; the sky was paler, but there were none of the pastel streaks that preceded an actual sunrise. ‘We get a clear night, and then it all closes in again.’

‘What are you, a poacher?’

‘Do I look like a poacher?’

‘Dunno. Too dark to see. I was thinking, the lamp? Don’t poachers lamp things?’

‘So I believe,’ Jane said. ‘But, like, not often at a quarter to seven in the morning.’

Incomers: what could you say?

Be a bit rude to lamp her directly, but the haze on the edge of the beam had revealed bushy red-gold hair, and the posh, musky voice suggested fairly young — probably a bit younger than Mum, maybe early thirties? Still sexy, anyway, and aware of it.

The déjà vu had explained itself — Jane recalling meeting another photographer, from the Guardian, one afternoon last summer when they’d been trying to get publicity for the campaign. This had also followed a visit to Lucy’s grave. It was like Lucy was the catalyst, her grave a live place. The idea made Jane feel happier. She asked the woman where she was from and got a vague arm-wave towards the orchard.

‘Oh… down there.’

‘No, I mean who are you with? Which paper?’

‘Oh, I see. Freelance. Observer, Independent on Sunday… magazines. I write the words, too, sometimes.’

Jane nodded. Wasn’t as if hacks and snappers were scarce in Ledwardine, not since the village had been identified as the principal centre of the — retch — New Cotswolds.

‘Lensi.’

‘Sorry?’

‘People call me Lensi. Used to be Lenni, but now it’s Lensi — L-EN-S-I. For obvious reasons.’

She had what Jane was starting to think of as a New Cotswold accent. Posh, but a trace of London. And… jolly. The only word for it. Super-confident, no sense of intruding.

‘Right,’ Jane said. ‘Cool.’

‘And you are?’

‘Jane.’

They’d come through the small gate at the top of the churchyard and out onto the still-deserted square, where the fake gaslamps exposed a biggish woman in light-blue Gore-Tex, gleamingly new. Wide face, wide mouth, lovely even, white teeth. Also sapphire earrings and Ugg boots — Chelsea wellies.

‘Well,’ Jane said. ‘I’d better be—’

‘So who is Lucy? I mean, you haven’t got a dog or anything with you?’

God.

‘She was a friend.’

‘Was?’

‘The graveyard? Flat stones with, like, names carved into them?’

Jane stopped by the unlit Christmas tree, over twice her height and swaying in the wind. She could see lights in the vicarage. Should be getting back. Mum had a funeral; she wouldn’t be in the best of moods by now.

‘Her name was Lucy Devenish. Used to have a shop just over there, called Ledwardine Lore. Got knocked off her moped. Killed. On the bypass.’

‘And you… still like to chat with her, do you?’

‘Look,’ Jane said, ‘if you want to catch the best of the early light, you could go down that alley, and you’ll come to a stile which takes you into the remains of an old orchard, with a gateway into—’

‘Coleman’s Meadow. I know. It’s the way I came.’

Jane stared at her, silent.

‘I live near there,’ Lensi said. ‘For nearly seven weeks now, on and off. We’re in a barn conversion.’

‘Cole Barn?’ Jane backed up into one of the oak pillars of the market hall. ‘You’ve bought Cole Barn? But it’s—’

Blighted was Gomer’s word. Been on the market for a while, very desirable property and everything, but who wanted to lay down big money and maybe wind up living next to an estate of luxury executive homes?

‘Just renting it, actually,’ the woman said. ‘We’re checking out the area generally, to see if we like it, before deciding whether we should buy ourselves in.’

Buy ourselves in?

‘And I was reading about all this kerfuffle over prehistoric remains, so now I’m sort of keeping an eye on it for the Indy, in case it blows up into something…’ Lensi stood back and stared openly at Jane. ‘You’re not Jane Watkins, by any chance?’

Damn.

‘They sent me some cuttings, including a picture of the girl who started all the fuss. Objecting to the housing, if I’ve got this right, because it was on a ley line or something? That was before they found the stones.’

Jane said nothing. Lensi peered at her, the camera swinging free, dense coppery hair falling over one eye.

‘You are!’ She began flapping her jacket. ‘Jane, what fun!’

‘Fun?’

‘Sorry!’ Lensi backing off, palms raised. ‘I know — serious matter. I realise that. Is it true you didn’t know anything about the buried stones when you started your campaign?’

‘Nobody did. And if you were at the meeting last night then you already know all this.’

‘Oh… none of that came out. It was quite disappointing. Jane, look, I’m sorry if I offended you. I just want to get this right. How you found out about the stones — just for information, I’m not writing it down or anything.’

Jane sighed. Eirion, who was planning a career in journalism, was always saying that pissing off the media was counter-productive. How could you expect them to publish the truth if you didn’t tell them the truth?

‘Please?’

‘OK… I’m like standing on Cole Hill.’

‘That’s the—’

‘It’s the only hill around here worth calling a hill. It was one evening last summer, and I had this… I’m not calling it a vision or anything, it was just some things coming together.’

How could you explain it to a stranger? How could you convey the sudden awareness, at sunset, of this dead straight ancient track, passing like quicksilver through the field gates at either end of the meadow in direct alignment with the church steeple?

Perfect example of a ley, as first discovered by Alfred Watkins, of Hereford, nearly a century ago, in this same countryside. Alfred Watkins wasn’t known to be an actual ancestor of Merrily and Jane Watkins, but who could say? She’d certainly felt he was there with her, like Lucy. Well, maybe not quite like Lucy.

‘Leys are… nobody knows for certain what they are. Just straight tracks from one ancient site to another, or maybe lines following arteries of earth energy. Or spirit paths. Where the dead walk?’

Lensi said nothing. The sky was shining dully, like a well-beaten drumskin.

‘The dead are very important,’ Jane said. ‘To a community. You need continuity.’

‘Really.’

‘Ancient people knew that, in a way we don’t today. It’s important, for stability, for the spirit of the place, to have the ancestors around, keep them on your side. Which is why we need to keep this ancient path open… passing through the church, through the graveyard and the medieval orchard… then through the standing stones, to the top of Cole Hill, the holy hill.’

‘Why is it holy?’

‘It’s like the guardian hill for the village. Cole is actually an old word for juggler or wizard. And Coleman’s Meadow, at its foot… The Coleman… the shaman? So, like, if you uncover the old stones after centuries and then take them away and build an estate of crappy executive homes for wealthy—’

The sapphire earrings twinkled.

‘If you build houses we don’t even need,’ Jane said, ‘then you’re breaking the only link we have with the earliest origins of the village for purely commercial reasons. So we set up the Coleman’s Meadow Preservation Society—’

‘We?’

‘Me and my… ex-boyfriend.’

‘This was a pagan sort of thing, was it?’

‘Kind of.’

‘As in worshipping old gods?’

‘The sun. The moon. Yeah, I suppose old gods. But obviously it’s not only pagans, it’s everybody who’s concerned about preserving what’s important. We’ve had a lot of support from all kinds of people, all over the country… abroad, even.’

‘Old gods.’ Lensi smiled in her patronising way, like all this was so incredibly quaint. ‘It was a stone circle?’

‘Just a stone row, they think.’

‘And that’s where the dead walk, is it?’

‘It’s a big subject.’ Jane looked up as a few isolated raindrops fell. ‘Look, I’m sorry… if I don’t get back I’m going to miss the school bus. I need to change.’

‘Of course. Jane,’ Lensi looked down at her camera, ‘I’d like to take a few pictures of you, if I may. I don’t mean now, obviously…’

‘Some people reckon we’ll have floods in the village,’ Jane said. ‘Could be some pictures for you there.’

‘Ordinary local news… that’s not really my thing.’

‘It’s just I got a lot of stick over it last time.’

‘Because of your mother’s job? What kind of pagan are you, exactly, Jane?’

‘I’m sorry — why are you interested?’

Lensi shrugged. Maybe she was just looking for a coven or something to join. It happened. Happened a lot these days, apparently. Like in the old days incomers would want to know about the tennis club or the bridge circle.

And this was a set-up, wasn’t it? This woman had recognised her and followed her into the churchyard. Didn’t really give a toss about the sunrise.

‘Look, I’ve got to — Going to be late for school, OK?’

The rain came on suddenly, like all the taps in heaven had been turned on. Lensi was shielding her camera, Jane backing off towards the vicarage, dragging up the hood of her parka, then turning to run, hard against the downpour.

Hearing Lensi calling after her, but she didn’t stop.

10 Peace on Earth

There was a sourness to it, this weather. The rain was rolling down from the Black Mountains like bales of barbed wire. It was relentless, and it sapped you.

Merrily slowed the Volvo behind a tractor and trailer. About five roads were closed, diversions in place. The route to Hereford took you through hamlets you’d forgotten existed, past flooded fields with surfaces like stretched cellophane. Was there such a condition as rain-sickness?

‘Why do they never dredge the rivers? That’s my point.’ Phone-in voice on Radio Hereford and Worcester. ‘How do they expect us not to get flooded if they don’t dredge the flamin’ rivers? Can you tell me why, Colin?’

Studio voice: ‘I’m afraid I can’t, Robert, but it’s a good point and one we’ll be putting to our expert from the Environment Agency who, of course, should’ve arrived by now but he’s — yes, you’ve guessed it — been held up by the floods.’

On days like this, virtually every programme on Hereford and Worcester turned into a flood programme. Which was useful but not the main reason Merrily was listening.

Finally showing up, with about ten minutes to spare, Jane had claimed she’d only been checking on the river.

Been away too long just for that, of course, but there was no time to go into it before the kid was off to catch the school bus, carrying a slice of yolky toast across the square. Merrily guessing she’d been over to Coleman’s Meadow to make sure nobody had come in the night and dug up the stones.

As if, having been the first in the new millennium to identify something odd about Coleman’s Meadow, she was now feeling personally responsible for it.

Was obsession too strong a word for this? Lucy Devenish, Thomas Traherne, Alfred Watkins, Nick Drake… a pale company of dead people with whom Jane felt—

‘Christ!’

The old Volvo was suddenly bucking against a wall of water, as the tractor and trailer up ahead plunged into a flooded dip in the lane where the ditch had overflowed. Merrily frantically wrestling for control as the black tide rose around the car, and the force of it, the weight of it, was unexpectedly frightening.

Then she was through.

But, hell, you could see how easy it would be to get trapped — tonight’s TV news screening a video clip, shot on somebody’s mobile phone, of a woman in a cassock being pulled by firefighters out of a side window of her drowning car.

She was testing her brakes, letting out her breath, as Colin on the radio suggested that, with Bishop’s Meadow already annexed by the swollen Wye, Hereford’s crucial Belmont roundabout would be closed before the evening rush hour. Colin sounding quite excited. However, as flood-relief seldom involved detectives, it seemed unlikely this was what Frannie Bliss had meant when he’d suggested that Merrily kept the radio on.

She’d called him on his mobile after Jane had caught the bus.

‘Norra good time, madam,’ Bliss said.

Not referring to her by name a signal that he was in the CID room. Understandably, Bliss had never liked to advertise a working relationship with the diocesan exorcist.

‘Any chance you could call me back, Frannie? Only wanted to ask one question.’

‘Yeh, I’ve heard that before.’

‘What would your Special Branch colleague be doing in Ledwardine?’

‘When?’

‘Last night.’ No use pretending she might’ve been mistaken; it was him. ‘At a parish meeting about the Coleman’s Meadow stones. He’d obviously come in after everybody else, sitting near the door, first one out.’

‘No idea, Merrily, I’m not one of his confidants. Maybe he’s bought himself a holiday cottage in Ledwardine. They’re on good money, the funny boys. Fringe benefits.’

‘I didn’t even know he was still around. Thought he’d gone back to the Met or wherever they hang out.’

‘Look,’ Bliss said, ‘I’ve gorra go. I’ll get back to you when I can, all right?’

‘Has something happened?’

‘Put your radio on,’ Bliss had said. ‘And keep it on.’

The travel update warned of serious flooding around Bromyard in the east, which could be a problem; she’d need to get over there within the next few days to pick up Lol’s Christmas present. Couldn’t leave it much longer — too much to do around the big day, and there was the delicate issue of introducing the midnight meditation on Christmas Eve.

Always a problem to alter anything in a village.

‘And if you’re having problems in your particular part of the two counties,’ Colin said, ‘ring in and tell us… our lines are open all day, every day right through Christmas.’

Christmas. Why did the glow always seem to fade, the closer you came to it? Why was there always some damn crisis? Peace on earth, goodwill to all—

‘—However, as you may have heard on the news, the floods aren’t the only problem in Hereford. Police have sealed off part of the city centre in the wake of last night’s—’

Ah…

‘—shocking discovery of a human head in the ruined Blackfriars Monastery in the Widemarsh Street area. Our reporter Arabella Finch is at the scene. Bella, what’s happening now?’

Merrily slowed, crawling into tree-fringed King’s Acre in the city’s western suburbs. The female voice came back in low quality, probably from a radio car.

‘Colin, I’m talking to you from one of the back streets between Widemarsh Street and Commercial Road from where it’s usually possible to see the ruins of the medieval Blackfriars Monastery. But not this morning. The whole area’s been completely screened off by the police who’ve set up an incident room at the Cantilupe School next door to the monastery. I’ve been told a press conference has been scheduled for twelve noon, when obviously we hope to learn more. But I can tell you that the head was found last night by a member of the public on or near the medieval preaching cross in the rose garden at the front of the monastery ruins.’

‘Bit of a shock for someone, Bella. And of course, this all happened when the city was absolutely packed with Christmas shoppers, in town for the traditional Wednesday evening late opening.’

‘There probably weren’t as many shoppers as usual, Colin, because of the floods, but obviously it’s made the police investigation a lot more difficult. With so many extra people about, it would be far easier for whoever left the head to come and go unnoticed.’

‘Now it’s a… it’s the head of a man, is that correct?’

‘That’s what we understand, Colin.’

‘And is this someone who was actually, you know, beheaded?’

‘My information is that it was done after death.’

‘Do they know who it is yet?’

‘Well, personally, I think they do, and there’s quite a buzz about it. I can’t see that they won’t be revealing a name in the course of the day, but relatives will have to be told first, of course. There has, obviously, been an extensive search for the rest of the body, but no suggestion that anything’s been found yet.’

‘And what about local people, Bella? The people living and working in a very built-up part of the city. How are they reacting?’

‘Well, as you can imagine nobody here can quite believe that something so, you know, horrific and barbaric should have come to Hereford. Earlier this morning, I talked to people living in the streets behind Blackfriars Monastery, as well as some coming to work in shops and offices around lower Widemarsh Street—’

Merrily switched off the litany of shock and disbelief and what’s the world coming to?

A black Christmas for somebody. No surprise that Bliss didn’t have time to speculate about what Jonathan Long might have been doing in Ledwardine.

Peace on earth, goodwill to all men.

Yeah, right.

Under a sky the colour of wet mortar, she came off the White Cross roundabout at the fourth exit, for the crematorium.

11 A Sense of Eternity

Quite a turnout for Tom Parson, and Merrily had known him well enough to make it meaningful — as much as you ever could with another funeral party waiting outside, stamping its feet and rubbing its hands.

Tom had been Old Ledwardine — at least, that was what she’d thought until she’d talked to the family.

‘Tom was… a character,’ she said in the chapel at the crem. ‘Someone of whom, now he’s gone, we say, We won’t see his kind again. Someone who was part of the fabric of the village. Old Ledwardine. I’m… not exactly Old Ledwardine, and I just assumed Tom’s family had been around the village for generations.’

In fact, she’d discovered, Tom Parson had been an incomer, a retiree. OK, thirty years ago and only from Shropshire. But there was surely a message here about how a community — even a landscape, or, as Jane would insist, the spiritual essence of a place — would absorb and condition people.

If it happened slowly. If it happened naturally. And if you kept open a few pathways to the past. If you had that grounding.

She didn’t say any of that. There wouldn’t be time — that was her excuse. Anyway, there’d be a memorial service for Tom back in the village after Christmas, followed by interment of the ashes in the churchyard; she’d be able to do a better job then. Tom’s niece had sent her away with a pile of his historical notes which she thought the parish ought to have. Maybe Jane could go through them.

But that was it for today. Merrily drove into the city centre and found a parking space on the corner of Broad Street and King Street, just across from the Cathedral, its sandstone tower wadded in charcoal cloud.

There was a light on, up in the Deliverance office in the gatehouse, and she could see Sophie Hill standing at the window, quite still, poised like a mannequin in some discreet dress shop for elegant women of a certain age.

But the composure was illusory. By the time she was halfway up the stone steps, Sophie was looking down at her, rigid now, in the office doorway.

‘Merrily—’

‘Just dropped in to see if you fancied a bit of lunch?’

‘Can’t. I’m sorry.’

‘Soph?’ Following her into the office, Merrily noticed that the white hair was coming adrift and a silver-blue silk scarf lay discarded in the correspondence tray. ‘Is there something…?

Looking into Sophie’s eyes. On any other woman’s face, the expression would convey maybe mildly disturbed. On Sophie it suggested horribly distraught.

‘Merrily, you’re not in a hurry, are you?’

‘Well, no, I—’

‘Could I ask you to mind the office for an hour? I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important. You’re not in a hurry, are you?’

‘You just asked me… No.’

‘Good. Thank you.’

Sophie pulled her coat from the peg. Merrily took off her black woollen funeral coat and went and sat down behind the desk. In the centre of it was the leather-bound pad Sophie used to take down the Bishop’s dictation. Nothing else.

‘There’s nothing I can…?’

‘If you could just look after the office for an hour. If the Bishop of Bath and Wells rings, tell him Bernard will get back to him tonight. If I’m going to be longer than an hour, I’ll call. If you have to leave, lock up, would you? You know where the keys are…?’

‘Of course I know where… You’re OK, aren’t you? I mean—’

‘Yes,’ Sophie said. ‘I’m fine.’

Had the Bishop’s secretary ever looked this pale?

Jane said, ‘You ever heard of a photographer known as Lensi?’

‘What?’

‘L-E-N-S-I.’

She was in a cubicle in the girls’ toilets, with the mobile. Keeping her voice down.

‘This a joke?’ Eirion said.

‘Irene, would I really be ringing you this time in the morning to tell you a joke?’

Was he glad she’d rung? Had his fancy phone ID’d her, with LED red stars glittering around her name? Was he excited to hear her voice, the way, if you twisted her arm, she’d have to admit it was really good to hear him, even to hear herself calling him Irene?

A few months ago, they’d been in one another’s phones all the time, like this was for eternity. But situations changed.

‘What’s she do?’ Eirion said.

‘She takes pictures. Photojournalist.’

Had to admit this was an excuse to call him. Yeah, yeah, she accepted she’d been looking for one and this would probably be the best reason she’d get this side of Christmas.

‘I don’t really know many photographers, except for a few TV cameramen,’ Eirion said. ‘I’m… as you know, I’m just another student.’

‘You don’t think you’re just another student, Irene.’

He read all the papers, in a professional kind of way. He remembered the bylines, who was a good writer, who got the biggest stories.

‘What’s her full name, Jane?’

‘I’ve told you, I don’t know her real name. She does pictures for the Independent.’

‘That’s a start. What’s she look like?’

‘Like… early thirties? Red-haired. Not small. Not exactly plump but certainly, you know, voluptuous.’

‘And you want to know about her because…?’

‘Because she’s just moved into the village and maybe has an interest in witchcraft or something. Not that she seems to know much about it. She’s probably just attracted to the nudity and fertility rites. And she wants to take my picture.’

‘Without your clothes?’

‘I can see I’m wasting my—’

‘If, however, you were just looking for a reason to call me, I’m flattered,’ Eirion said.

‘I was not—’

‘Jane, you’re doing your smoky voice.’

‘I’m trying to be discreet, you smug Welsh git! I’m at school, in the bog.’

A silence. Eirion drew breath.

‘A proper name would help. Jane, look… seriously, we haven’t really seen much of each other since the summer, have we?’

‘If you remember, you went off to university.’

‘It’s Cardiff. It’s less than a two-hour drive away, and I’m home at weekends. As you know.’

‘A lot can happen at university. You’re young — youngish — and unattached. Universities are full of loose women.’

‘Let’s not go into all that again,’ Eirion said. ‘I can assure you there hasn’t been anybody for—’

‘Longer than one night?’

‘For just over four months, I was going to say. Which, in case you’ve forgotten…’

‘No, I—’ Jane’s voice died on her. But could she believe this? ‘I haven’t forgotten.’

‘So I was thinking… Well, my dad and Gwennan were supposed to be going to France for Christmas, with the girls and I was thinking you could maybe’ve come over here.’

‘Where we’d have the house to ourselves. Kind of thing.’

‘Only that’s not going to happen now. Sioned sprained an ankle skating and they’re putting it off until the New Year, when you’ll probably be back at school. So I was wondering about maybe coming over there. Like for a few days?’

‘And stay where — the Black Swan?’

‘Yeah, on my massive student grant. I was actually thinking… the vicarage? You’ve got a lot of spare bedrooms. I’d pay, you know, reasonably normal rates. B-and-B?’

‘That’s—’

‘What do you think? Just to see if there’s… you know… anything left? You know what I’m saying.’

‘Irene, we were childhood sweethearts. It’s a phase.’

‘A phase.’

‘And like, if you really don’t know if there’s anything left—’

‘On your side. I meant your side. My side I know about.’

‘Oh.’

‘Jane, would I really be sitting here getting all sweaty and embarrassed and stuff, if I wasn’t still…?’

She didn’t say anything. She realised she was smiling.

Realising he’d never really gone away. That her life was full of Eirion cross-references. Although that wasn’t necessarily a good thing, was it? They were young, they were supposed to be putting themselves about. Why was she smiling?

‘It was just a thought, all right?’ Eirion said.

‘Of course, if the dig’s on in Coleman’s Meadow,’ Jane said, ‘I was supposed to be, you know, helping?’

‘And that’s limited, is it, to people who’ve belatedly applied for archaeology courses on account of they’ve been watching Time Team and Trench One and can’t think of any quicker way to get on TV?’

‘Au contraire, Welshman, I believe I can bring to the study of antiquities something new and meaningful.’

‘As distinct from your usual pseudo-pagan New Age bullshit.’

‘And I’m thinking, could I stand this for a whole week?’

‘Jane, you’d love it.’

‘I’ll talk to Mum,’ Jane said.

Somehow excited. Despicable, really.

Sophie, nun-like in her long charcoal-grey coat and her silk scarf, was walking rapidly across the Cathedral Green towards the Castle Street entrance, furled umbrella under her arm.

She lived back there, in one of the posh terraces behind the cloisters and the Cathedral School. Her husband was an architect, semi-retired now, the golf club a second home. An adopted son lived in Canada.

Merrily watched her from the office window. Some domestic crisis? Domestic, for Sophie, usually meant the Cathedral. Which she served. Living within its ambience, more a part of it than any of the bishops she’d worked for. Whatever had happened, it had to be serious for Sophie to be walking away from the Cathedral at not yet one p.m. on a working day.

When she passed out of sight, between the bare trees, Merrily switched on the computer, opened the Deliverance file.

Still just one entry for this month: a vague report of what Huw Owen would call a volatile — poltergeist activity, alleged, at a small warehouse on the Holmer trading estate. Request for assistance withdrawn before it could be checked out. Pity, really. There was always a reason for reported phenomena, always something interesting. But the Deliverance Ministry wasn’t the police; you went where you were invited.

The report, however, would stay on file in perpetuity, in case some future Deliverance adviser should be approached by some future tenant of the premises.

If nothing else, this job gave you a sense of eternity.

If nothing else…? In many ways, Deliverance gave you too much — too much to question, too much strangeness. Too much that seemed to have very little to do with faith and the yearning for transcendence, more with a basic, primeval fear of the unknowable. Sometimes the roles of priest and exorcist didn’t seem wholly compatible.

Time on her hands now, Merrily put the computer to sleep and tapped Al and Sally Boswell’s number in Knight’s Frome into her mobile, to check on the progress of Lol’s Christmas present.

‘Well, I think it’s nearly ready,’ Sally said. ‘Probably tomorrow, all being well.’

‘And I do want to pay the proper price.’

‘Al says you’ll pay what he asks. He’s quite annoyed with Laurence for not telling him sooner about what happened to the other one.’

‘Lol blames himself. Whereas I blame myself because it was smashed on the instructions of a man he was approaching on my behalf.’

‘It was a guitar, Merrily, not some holy relic.’

‘Sally, to Lol, a Boswell guitar is as close to a holy relic as you can get with steel strings.’

Sally laughed and said Al would understand. Al was of Romani descent. The lute-shaped bodies of his guitars contained many different kinds of wood, most of them pulled from the hedgerows and the copses and dingles of the Frome Valley where the Romani used to come annually to pick hops.

Sally, very olde English gentry, said, ‘I probably forgot to mention, he’s finally taken on an apprentice. Becoming more aware of his mortality, perhaps, and the need to pass on his skills. But that does mean he needs to turn out more instruments per annum, if only to pay the boy a reasonable wage. So, you see, they aren’t quite so rare and precious any more.’

‘How about I come over at the weekend? Is a cheque OK?’

‘Do watch out for the floods, though, won’t you, Merrily?’

‘The Frome’s out?’

‘Not yet,’ Sally said, as the office phone began ringing. ‘Well, not here, anyway, but Al tells me he’s seen the snails moving uphill.’

‘What?’

‘Hundreds of them, Al says. It’s an old sign. Slugs, too, apparently. A scramble for higher ground.’

‘Blimey. Look, Sally, I’ll have to go, I’m on my own in the office and the phone’s ringing.’

The Bishop of Baths and Wells? God, who was the Bishop of Bath and Wells now? As Merrily clicked off the mobile, a gust of new rain skated over the window behind her, like brushes on a snare drum, and she glanced over her shoulder. The way you did, now that something as drably prosaic as rain had turned sinister. She picked up the phone.

‘Merrily.’

‘Sophie?’

‘I wonder if you might join me.’

‘Now? Me? Where?’

‘I can meet you on the corner of Castle Street and Quay Street — do you know where I mean? It will take you no more than about three minutes on foot.’

‘Probably need to bring the car, Sophie, I think I’m about to get nicked for outstaying my welcome in King Street. What’s happened?’

‘I’ll meet you in ten minutes, then.’

‘Has something happened?’

A clock ticking at Sophie’s end. A big, old clock.

‘Sophie?’

‘You may not have heard, but there’s been a particularly horrific murder in the city. Or at least—’

‘I heard on the radio, yeah. You mean where the victim was… beheaded?’

Merrily stood up. Down below, Broad Street was like a sepia print, all its colours draining away in the downpour, and the Cathedral Green was deserted.

‘I’m with his widow,’ Sophie said.

12 Throwback

Sophie was waiting in Castle Street under her pink and yellow golf umbrella. Surreal, like a bad dream in which you somehow understood that pink and yellow were the colours of foreboding and death.

‘Nobody here knows yet,’ Sophie said. ‘When it comes out, all hell—’

Her face looked thinner, with hollows. They were alone in what had been the medieval heart of Hereford. No shops here, no obvious public buildings, only timber-gabled cottages and three-storey Georgian town houses. Quiet, except for the beating rain and the murmur of old money, what was left of it.

Never mind Baghdad, think how many heads must’ve rolled routinely down here, below the walls of Hereford Castle.

Merrily had found a parking space near the footpath to the Castle Green. Not a stone left of the castle now, unless some remained in the foundations of these steep, solid, private dwellings, one owned by Sophie and her husband, another by…

‘What’s her name?’

‘Helen,’ Sophie said. ‘Ayling. We’ve… known one another for some years.’

‘I’ve heard that name… Ayling… have I?’

‘Well, of course you have.’

But the connection wouldn’t come. Merrily felt damp and uncomfortable in her funeral clothes.

‘She hadn’t reported him missing,’ Sophie said. ‘Hadn’t seen him for more than twenty-four hours, but it wasn’t the first time.’

‘Oh my God, she had to identify…?’

‘No, they spared her that.’ Sophie nodded down the street towards a three-storey terrace of old red brick. ‘It’s the middle one, with the cream door.’

She pointed the umbrella, began to follow it into the road. Merrily stayed at the kerb, getting very wet very quickly.

‘Sophie… why me?’

‘Because you’re…’ Sophie came back, held the umbrella over them both ‘… because you’re a widow and… and a priest. And you mix with these people.’

‘People? You mean the police?’

‘And because you’re here. Helen doesn’t have any relatives.’

Didn’t sound right. A touch nervous now, Merrily let herself be steered into a narrow alley at the end of the terrace, Sophie deciding they wouldn’t use the front door.

‘They’ll see us.’

‘Who?’

‘You didn’t notice the car parked on a double yellow line?’

‘The police?’

‘Watching the house. They wanted a woman to come in and stay with her, a… what do you call them?’

‘Family liaison officer?’

‘Well, even I know what that’s really for. Someone following her around, being solicitous, making tea, hoping she’ll let something slip.’

‘What?’

‘Here.’

Sophie pushed at a mossy, Gothic-pointed door in a high brick wall.

They were in a substantial walled garden. A dead fountain in an overflowing stone pool, rain bouncing angrily from a small conservatory backing on to the house.

‘We were in the Cathedral choir together,’ Sophie said.

As if this explained something.

‘How come no relatives?’

‘Well, not in Hereford, anyway. She met Clement in London when she was a secretary with the Association of County Councils, and he—’

‘Clement?’

‘Clement Ayling.’

‘Christ,’ Merrily said.

A high-ceilinged drawing room. The grandfather clock doing its hollow thock thock in the shadows. Tall windows silvered by the rain, a pastel green glow from a small reading lamp on a coffee table and a crimson glimmer from the fireplace. Pictures on the walls of the same man shaking hands with various notables: Princess Anne, Margaret Thatcher.

‘Merrily lost—’ Sophie coughed. ‘Lost her husband some years ago. In a car crash.’

Helen Ayling looked up, confused, from a brown leather wing chair. ‘And had he stormed out after a row?’ She steadied the white china cup and saucer on her knees. ‘I’m sorry, I—’

‘After several rows, actually,’ Merrily said. ‘Sometimes he walked out, sometimes I walked out. But it’s… hardly the same.’

The atmosphere was different from the dimmed death houses she often had to visit. Unstable here, still slippery with congealing shock. She and Sophie were sharing a creaky leather chesterfield. On the wall behind his widow’s head, Councillor Clem Ayling stood shoulder to shoulder with Bill Clinton — but only, Merrily guessed, for the photo.

‘It was rather stupid of me,’ Helen Ayling said, ‘even to mention the row. But you don’t think, do you? You can’t think. It’s as though everything around you is collapsing.’

No make-up, and her eyes were dry. She was slim and tidy and her short brown hair, though tangled, looked freshly washed. Merrily had imagined she’d be around the same age — who knew? — as Sophie, but she was younger, maybe late forties. So about twenty years younger than Clem Ayling.

‘They said to me, what was it about? What were you arguing about? I said, it’s none of your business, it’s a private matter — we had a row, like couples do, he walked out and he didn’t…’ her voice gave out and she swallowed ‘… come back.’

Merrily looked up at Clement Ayling in the Thatcher photo. A bulky, beaming man with grey hair, crisp and wavy, and an almost-Edwardian moustache. She’d never met him, knew him only by reputation: an old-school Tory, a dinosaur, a throwback.

Merrily’s mouth was dry. Someone had killed a former leader of the city council and cut off his head. All hell would break loose.

‘He’d done it before,’ Helen Ayling said. ‘Last time he booked into the Castle House, just up the street. He has an office, with a change of clothes, and he’d go directly there the following day. After he retired, the council became… most of who he was.’

Merrily nodded.

‘The police said, why didn’t you report him missing? I tried to explain, but they didn’t seem convinced.’ Both hands gripping the cup. ‘Oh, dear God.’

‘When you say the police…?’

‘Man with some sort of Northern accent.’

‘Liverpool?’

‘Perhaps.’

The strategic hypocrisy of the cops. As if they’d have reacted at all, the same night, to a report of a man walking out on his wife. Even if it was a face from the Hereford Times.

Helen Ayling sat up, placing the cup and saucer on the table, shaking her head.

‘I still can’t take it in. The sheer horror of it. When did they do it? He was on foot. Were they waiting somewhere here? Did they take him somewhere to—?’

‘Don’t.’

Sophie reaching over, taking Helen’s hands. Sophie’s eyes suddenly blazing with outrage. That it could happen here. In this most protected, select part of town. This conservation area. Under the Cathedral that Sophie served.

‘The police were all over the house,’ Helen said. ‘And the garden. Putting all the lights on. The tool-shed…’

Yes, they would have to look in the tool shed.

‘You’ll stay with us tonight, Helen?’

‘Sophie, thank you, but… I have to stay here, don’t I? For as long as… Have to get used to it.’

‘I’m not sure that’s a good idea, Mrs Ayling,’ Merrily said. ‘I’m afraid you’re going to get them all hanging around outside — national press, TV. That’s one reason the police suggest a family liaison officer stays here with you. Protect your privacy when your… when they release your husband’s name.’

‘They can’t protect you from your thoughts, though, can they?’

‘With regard to that,’ Sophie said, ‘I thought Merrily could perhaps do something… pray with you?’

‘Sophie…’ Helen Ayling, perhaps understandably, looking less than eager. ‘I rather think…’

‘I understand that at times like this,’ Merrily said, ‘prayer can be difficult, so…’

Helen Ayling nodded, her eyes falling shut like an old-fashioned doll’s. ‘It’s not real to me yet. They can’t even—’ Her eyes flicked open, looking into Merrily’s. ‘Your husband… was he… his body… able to be identified… by you?’

‘No. His car went into a motorway bridge. At speed.’

Sean’s body pulped and shredded and mingled with the remains of his mistress.

The front-door knocker crashed twice; Helen Ayling and Merrily both flinched.

‘Stay there.’ Sophie came to her feet, moved to the door to the hall. ‘I’ll see who it is.’

Helen nodded wearily, pulling a dark green cardigan around her shoulders. Merrily sat there feeling all wrong in her cassock, like some kind of attendant angel of death. Noting that Helen Ayling’s eyes remained dry, without the hollow shining light that came with real grief. Pain was there and revulsion, but if this had been a marriage made in heaven something in heaven was malfunctioning.

‘The Blackfriars priory,’ Helen said. ‘Monastery. I’ve never even been there. I’m sure my husband never mentioned it. And the… the Preaching Cross. Why…?’

And then Sophie was back, carrying her grey coat and Merrily’s coat and the wet umbrella.

‘It’s the police again. Not Bliss this time, Merrily. It looks as if he’s been relieved by his superior officer.’

‘Howe?’

Sophie nodded. Merrily stood up at once. If it was Howe, better she wasn’t here.

‘Helen, we can probably both wait in the kitchen,’ Sophie said, ‘if we’re quiet.’

‘Please make yourselves some tea. Anything you want.’ Helen crossing the room, head bowed. ‘I’ll let them in.’

At the door, she turned. She looked small and devastated, like a lost child in a department store.

‘Why do they keep coming here? I’m not part of this. He was a public man. Even in… death.’

She went out quickly, almost running, and Merrily followed Sophie into the inner hall leading to the kitchen, the way they’d come in, Merrily looking back once, thinking, yes, in many ways this was the same as her and Sean.

When a man you were supposed to love and didn’t any more came to a sudden and savage end, it messed you up in all kinds of unforeseeable ways.

13 All of Him

Obviously Annie Howe would come in for this one. This was high-profile in every respect. This would be national news. And besides…

‘My father knew your husband for many years,’ Annie Howe was saying. ‘He’s asked me to express to you his—’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘County Councillor Howe? Charles Howe?’

‘Charlie,’ Helen Ayling said. ‘Yes, of course.’

Yes, there was that very useful connection.

Merrily stood listening in the inner hall, with its stained panels and yellowing mouldings. The door to the drawing room wasn’t quite closed. She’d put on her coat and her gloves, and it was still cold, looked cold in the blue-grey light from a single frosted window at the far end.

There was a radiator, but it was off. Evidently not a man to waste money, Clem Ayling. At least, not his own.

Annie Howe said, ‘I spoke to my father this morning. In confidence — he’s an ex-police officer. He asked me to convey to you his regret at what’s happened to your husband.’

His regret that someone killed your husband and cut off his head? The Charlie that Merrily knew would have said far more but, like New York cops on TV who tossed out a cursory ‘Sorry for your loss’ before cutting to the chase, Annie Howe didn’t do warmth. Or even, come to think of it, fury.

Helen said, ‘Charlie was here… I don’t know, some weeks ago.’

‘Mrs Ayling, I’d like to ask you a few more questions relating to your husband’s council work.’

‘I’m afraid he didn’t—’

‘If you could bear with me… the last day you were together, that’s the day before yesterday, you told my colleague your husband was out all day, at meetings. Do you remember precisely which meetings?’

‘The morning, I’m not sure, but in the afternoon I know he had a meeting of Hereforward.’

‘Hereforward — could you remind me…?’

‘It’s where they discuss radical, long-term ideas for the future of the county, with various appointed consultants. Clem always hated going, but he didn’t like the idea of anything like that even existing, unless he was there to monitor it. Bunch of outsiders, he used to say, who couldn’t care less about Hereford. But then he also used to say that about most of the council officials.’

‘He didn’t get on with certain officials? Can you think of anyone in particular?’

‘Not really, Superintendent. He used to say most of them simply saw Herefordshire as a stepping stone to somewhere more important.’

‘But nobody in particular.’

‘I don’t think he singled out… He also thought some of them were giving jobs to their friends who weren’t up to it. As well as having too many parties and drinking sessions. I’m sure Charlie’s told you—’

‘Yes,’ Howe said, ‘but I’d like to hear about it from your husband’s perspective.’

Sophie had appeared in the doorway with a white china cup and saucer, the cup’s contents steaming. Merrily followed her across the passage to the kitchen. All this was no business of hers, but sometimes — and she wasn’t proud of this — it helped to have inside information to trade with Frannie Bliss.

‘God knows, Sophie, I’ve tried to like that woman. Cold, no people skills and she’ll be chief constable before she’s forty — that’s what Bliss says.’ Softly shutting the kitchen door behind her, she unbuttoned her coat, pulled off her gloves. ‘How am I doing for Christian charity so far?’

‘You look starved.’

‘That’s because I haven’t eaten.’

Aching for a cigarette, Merrily sat down at the round central table. The kitchen was lofty and oppressive, all dark wood and high cupboards. She drank some tea and looked at Sophie, who was standing with her back to the stove — a Rayburn, not an Aga.

‘How long have they lived here?’

‘He lived here for over thirty years,’ Sophie said. ‘They were married… ten, twelve years ago?’

‘Not a first marriage, then.’

‘His first wife died. Two grown-up children, both… away.’

‘So how much will Helen…?’

‘Inherit? I don’t know. If she gets the house, she’ll sell it. It’s entirely impractical, just a symbol of Clement’s status. Bought it when his business was flourishing, in the 1970s.’

‘What was his business?’

‘Electrical goods, small chain of discount shops. Lucrative in their time. Gone before you arrived here, I think. His daughters weren’t interested in taking it on.’

‘You don’t think Helen will stay?’

‘I think she’ll be off as soon as he’s buried.’ Sophie came to sit down. ‘It was a dream gone sour. A rather naive dream. I don’t know what he promised her, but she had this vision of an elegant, graceful life in the Cathedral Close. Civilised dinner parties, receptions, nights at the theatre. This is just… just a market town with a cathedral.’

Sophie looked up at the soiled ceiling, wrinkled her nose. ‘All the changes she was going to make to the house and wasn’t allowed to. What’s wrong with it? he used to say, and I think he really didn’t know. Self-made man, you see, his father was a manual worker. Mrs Thatcher — you saw the photo?’

‘Mmm.’

‘His idol. The small-businessman’s daughter. Waste not, want not. He loved it when she was advising us to stock up on tinned food. He’d go to Tesco and come back with nine tins of stewed steak. Also thought — like Mrs T — that the worst thing to happen to the twentieth century was the 1960s.’

Merrily said nothing. If there was a margin between this and Sophie’s own philosophy, it was slender.

‘And she actually didn’t realise any of this before she married him?’

‘He was — I’ve heard this from quite a few people — a very different man when he was away from home. He was always dynamic, in a heavy sort of way, full of a sometimes alarming energy. And away from Hereford he became… expansive. Generous, charming. As if he saw himself as an ambassador. Helen was exposed to the full force of it, at a particularly vulnerable time in her life.’

Sophie got up and went to the door to check if the police were still in the house.

‘Familiar story. Still living at home, caring for her disabled father. And then he died, leaving a void she had no idea how to fill. Clement Ayling was rather good at filling voids.’ She came back and sat down. ‘I’d guess it barely survived the wedding. Within two years she was almost suicidal. But wouldn’t leave, you see — couldn’t. She’d made her bed.’

‘So this row they had — what do you think that was about?’

‘She’s not going to tell anyone now, Merrily. To be quite honest, I’d’ve thought a row would have been almost a positive step. Most of the time they hardly communicated any more. Helen said the council was most of what he’d become… I’d go further. Since he sold the business, the council was all of him.’

‘So…’ No way of edging around this. ‘Frannie Bliss suspects that Helen might have had something to do with Ayling’s death? Is that what you’re thinking?’

Sophie stared at the closed door, her hands around the small brown teapot. A tea-for-two, waste-not-want-not kind of teapot.

Merrily said, ‘That why I’m here, Sophie? Second opinion?’

‘Given—’ Anxiety bloomed in Sophie’s eyes. ‘Given the nature of his death, that seems… barely conceivable.’

‘We don’t know the nature of his death. Only what was done to him, presumably afterwards. His whole body could be in… portable fragments.’

Sophie was rigid now, palms flat on the table.

‘Oh, look,’ Merrily said, ‘Bliss would just be going through the motions. When there’s a murder, the first person who needs to be eliminated is the partner. Because… in most cases, the partner did it. And you just said yourself that she was desperate. Suicidal.’

‘I said almost suicidal. She got used to it, Merrily, as people usually do. As women of my generation almost always did.’

‘No, you’re right,’ Merrily said. ‘It’s ridiculous.’

Dismissing the image of a wretched, half-demented Helen Ayling carrying her husband’s head through the Christmas crowds in a shopping bag. But it was no surprise that they’d checked out the tool shed.

Merrily sat back. Her stomach felt like an empty fridge. She wanted to pray, preferably over a cigarette.

Sophie said, ‘If Inspector Bliss thinks—’

‘Sophie… whatever Bliss thinks doesn’t matter any more. It’s what…’ Merrily nodded at the door. ‘It’s what she thinks.’

‘We should go.’

Sophie was on her feet, carrying the crockery to the sink, numbly turning on taps. Merrily found a tea towel, and they performed, in silence, a domestic ritual which might never seem as comfortingly familiar again.

They left by the back door, not speaking until they were in the alley. The rain had thinned; the sun was a voyeur behind dirty curtains of cloud.

Merrily was thinking that Howe and whoever was carrying her bag might be closeted with Helen until dark.

‘I’ll come back later,’ Sophie said. ‘When they’ve gone.’

‘Be slightly careful, Sophie.’

‘I shall sit and listen. Without questioning.’ Sophie had put up the golf umbrella, a garish blossom in the drizzle on Castle Street. ‘Do you want to come back for something to eat, Merrily? It really won’t take me—’

‘No… thank you. Really, I need to get back. Get out of these clothes.’

Merrily saw that there was still a car across the street, parked on the double yellow lines. Sophie turned to walk home, looking back over her shoulder.

‘I’ll call you tonight. After I’ve talked to Helen.’

‘I’d be glad if you would.’

Walking back to the Volvo, Merrily felt choked up with doubt and uncertainty about something that was not her business. And apprehension about Sophie, about whom she harboured no doubts, no uncertainties.

As she reached the unmarked police car, another car pulled in behind it, a window gliding down.

‘You got time for a coffee, Reverend?’ Frannie Bliss said.

14 Joy to the World

In a Chromium cafe on Broad Street, Bliss was taking his filter coffee black, to match his mood. His face was sallow with freckles, his hair had been eroded beyond comb-over to the shaven stage, never totally convincing in December.

Not yet forty, looked older.

‘She wants me out,’ he said.

At barely four p.m., the day was signing off. The winter-holiday lights over the street were ice blue and sea green. No angels, no Santas, no reindeer.

‘Hang on in there, Frannie,’ Merrily said. ‘She might be up for a transfer to the Met or something.’

Bliss looked up over his bitter coffee with a bitter little smile. ‘Merrily, I meant Kirsty.’

‘Oh God.’ Merrily lowering her mug. ‘I thought you’d managed to… deal with things.’

‘You can only paper over the cracks so many times before the paste stops sticking and the frigging paper falls off.’

‘What about the kids? It’s… Christmas.’

‘Oh, Christmas helps. We always went to the in-laws’ farm for Christmas. Gorra lot more going for it, for kids, than a semi in Marden.’

‘That’s where they’ve gone?’

‘The farm, yeh. Only this time they won’t be coming back on Boxing Day. The house… the house we can flog, for less than we paid last year, or I can buy Kirsty’s half — the options were efficiently outlined for me in an email waiting on me lappie. By wanting me out, I meant out of her life, not necessarily off the premises, if I can buy her out. Lucky me.’

‘God, I’m so sorry, Frannie. Look, if there’s any—’

‘Got in, in good time for breakfast, she’s already buggered off. Even turned the heating off. Shut the frigging heating down! Must’ve stayed up half the night working out the details in this state of cold rage she can keep up for hours. So…’ Bliss leaned back on his stainless steel stool ‘… there goes another happy family Christmas exchanging presents round the tree, watching Harry Potter with the kids…’

Merrily said nothing. Never met Kirsty, but she could only ever imagine Bliss half-watching Harry Potter with his kids and hoping the phone would ring before the Quidditch game was into injury time.

‘I mean, you were right,’ he said. ‘Howe — goes without saying — would also love to be attending me farewell piss-up. Not happy that she wasn’t informed as soon as it was found.’

‘So why wasn’t she informed?’

‘Because somebody said, you know, let’s not bother her, it’s Christmas…’

‘Frannie.’

Nobody could say Bliss allowed other people to dig his grave. ‘Under normal circs, I’d be number two on this, but she’s brought her own feller over from Worcester. DI Brent, PhD. A Ph frigging D! What’s happening, Merrily? All these higher-educated, fast-track police persons together… in a school.’

‘The incident room?’

‘Taken over the school next door. Packed the kids off home. So we’ve got Howe as headmistress, Brent as deputy. Kevin Snape as school secretary, fortunately.’

‘What are you on about?’

‘Office manager — that’s the bloke responsible for organising the show. Kevin’s a mate, so I get to keep tabs.’ Bliss poured himself more coffee. ‘Quite like to have seen Annie’s face when she found you and Sophie in Ayling’s back parlour.’

‘She didn’t. Annie Howe doesn’t know I’ve been anywhere near Ayling’s parlour.’

Merrily explained. Giving him the edited version, Sophie’s role minimised. Telling him what little she’d heard from behind the drawing-room door.

‘Played the dad card, Frannie.’

‘Charlie?’

‘Mmm.’

‘Bloody Charlie Howe. West Mercia’s finest, as was. Still walks around Gaol Street in his capacity as a member of the Police Authority. Always your mate. Leave it with me, brother, I’m on your side. Tapping his nose. Bent old twat.’

Merrily said nothing. Ex-Chief Superintendent Charlie Howe. Had he helped cover up a murder many, many years ago? Never proven, never would be, and now Charlie was this ever-popular senior councillor with a daughter doing awfully well in the police service, and not a mark on her.

‘Does it still count for much round here, do you think?’ Bliss said. ‘Ancestry? Roots? I’m standing in the middle of town last night with Kirsty and the progeny, and I’m looking round and I’m thinking, what the fuck am I doing here? I don’t fit in. But, then… I might still feel like that if I had roots and saw what was happening to Hereford under Charlie and his mates. I remember what happened to Liverpool.’

‘It’s still not a bad place, Frannie. And you’ve had your moments. More than Annie Howe.’

‘Yeh, and which of us is the frigging acting superintendent? Look, you wanna bun or something? Jammy doughnut?’

‘Yes.’ Merrily slid down from her stool. ‘I’ll get them.’

Waiting at the counter, she exhaled, closing her eyes. Christmas. The wonderful, life-affirming festive season. Joy to the world.

The doughnut energising him, Bliss said that if Howe hadn’t taken over he might well have had Helen Ayling brought in this morning for some serious Q and A.

‘A bit too quiet, that woman. Not many tears.’

‘She was a secretary. Discreet. And maybe it wasn’t exactly a love match.’

‘That was your impression, was it?’

‘Frannie, I’m just a priest.’

Bliss wrinkled his nose. Like much of Merseyside, he’d been raised a Roman Catholic. His idea of a priest didn’t include Anglicans, never mind women.

‘An old-fashioned man, Merrily. That was what she said about him. Well, we knew that — old-fashioned in the sense of insular, pigheaded, bigoted… And the wife would be property, like a car, best kind being cheap to run and not too much engine noise.’

‘Maybe.’

‘So Helen… Think about it. She’s been brought into a strange city. She’s isolated, unhappy, and it gets no better. Trapped with Mr Hereford in a five-bedroom mausoleum, last decorated in 1973. And then old Clem does or says something that finally flips her big red switch, she pulls a kitchen knife off the rack and… sometimes it’s quite easily done, Merrily. You’d be surprised.’

‘And then?’ She looked around; a few other people in the cafe, none of them close enough to hear. ‘And then this quiet, discreet, middle-aged secretary gets a hacksaw from the tool shed and saws him up? You really think that?’

‘Actually, we borrowed the hacksaw, and it’s clean. They’re almost 100 per cent on a chainie now, which would mean lots of blood spatter and there were no immediate signs of that. But some ladies are a whizz with a mop and a bucket of Flash.’

‘Frannie—’

‘Merrily, it happens. Most killers never meant to be killers, and they panic. And then they either become very calm and sensible and give themselves up or they get increasingly wild and irrational.’

‘All right — what about the rest of him?’

‘Yeh, he was a big man. To move him far she might need help, I’d concede that, unless—’

‘Maybe a bunch of burly Liberal Democrats?’

‘—Unless he was reduced to manageable pieces. But chop-up jobs, butchery, it’s usually men. Takes a strong stomach and a fair bit of strength unless you’ve a lorra time to play with.’ Bliss looked down at his second doughnut for a few seconds, then back at Merrily. ‘No, all right, for what it’s worth, I don’t think it’s her.’

‘Then why the hell have we spent the last ten minutes—?’

‘Because I think that’s what Howe was hoping. That she could hang it on Mrs A. Because… what’s the alternative?’

‘Ayling’s council work?’

‘Which is sensitive. Which is why Annie’s here.’

‘Because of Charlie?’

‘Now wouldn’t it be lovely…’ Bliss beamed ‘… if Clement Ayling was killed by Charlie Howe?’

‘You jest, right?’

‘Regrettably, I probably do, but Charlie’s always gorra lot to hide, and Annie knows that. And if we start poking into council business, who knows what might else be uncovered? If Charlie goes down for any small indiscretion, where does that leave Annie’s glittering career?’

‘And, as Annie probably knows, that wouldn’t totally break your heart, would it, Frannie?’

‘I’m saying nothing until my lawyer gets here,’ Bliss said.

‘So you think Annie Howe’s stepped in — taken over — to steer the investigation away from anything close to Charlie? I mean… how close is it to Charlie?’

‘All right, here’s the scenario,’ Bliss said. ‘Ayling leaves a meeting of this think-tank committee, Hereforward, held at the Green Dragon at around three-thirty p.m., just before it starts to go dark. Home is a five-minute walk across the Cathedral Green. He never makes it.’

‘So he was killed soon after leaving the meeting?’

‘Or taken, anyway. Somebody — perhaps, considering the size of him, more than one person — got to him between the Green Dragon and Castle Street. Maybe he got into a car. Maybe he had something to follow up from the meeting, went off with somebody.’

‘Is Charlie Howe—?’

‘Yeh, Charlie’s on that committee. In fact, I’ve just fixed up to meet one of the Hereforward officials tomorrow, find out what they were discussing. Ayling might’ve made himself unpopular over some issue — you never know, do you?’

‘So Ayling could’ve actually been attacked on the Cathedral Green itself?’

‘Possible,’ Bliss said. ‘But unlikely. Too many people about. But he must’ve been taken somewhere, that’s the point. Somewhere… his head is removed, the body disposed of.’

‘But why was the head then taken to Blackfriars?’

‘You tell me. I gather you know a bit about religion.’

‘Bit before my time, pre-Reformation monasteries.’

‘It’s a public place,’ Bliss said. ‘But not so public that installing a favourite councillor’s head would attract a cheering crowd. Even in the daytime, people don’t go in that garden. It doesn’t lead anywhere — there’s a great tall fence round it. It’s not like the Cathedral Green, a short cut to all kinds of places. Blackfriars, after dark, you could position your trophy without being disturbed.’

‘Trophy?’

‘I think so.’

‘The way medieval heads were displayed? Traitors and turncoats?’

‘Making a point,’ Bliss said.

‘And that point is…?’

Bliss shrugged.

‘It’s an age of extremes. Lorra anger in this county at the moment, Merrily. Anger at a Government that doesn’t give a shit for rural areas. Anger at the council because it gets squeezed by the Government and pushes council tax through the roof, goes for easy cash cuts.’

‘Wholesale school closures?’

‘All carried out, of course, on the advice of senior officials. Career rats, with no attachment to the area, and most councillors don’t have the brains to argue. But they’re the ones who take the shite. Frustration boiling over into rage across the city and the fields and orchards of this once-glorious county. Or hasn’t it penetrated to leafy Ledwardine?’

‘Are you kidding?’

Bliss was right. If rage was smoke, this inherently laid-back county would have suffocated. But it was a big step from cursing the local authority in the pub to hunting down and killing a senior member, decapitating him, putting his head up like a trophy.

‘Or maybe some individual has had a particularly bad time because of some aspect of council policy. Social-services issue, maybe. A feller can go crazy if his family’s lost their home or they’ve had a kiddie taken away by social workers.’

‘Ayling was on the social-services committee?’

‘At one time or another, Ayling was on everything, Merrily. He had more fingers than they had pies. And he was vocal. Big noisy feller. Never kept his opinions to himself. Not the way it’s done these days. You filter it through the Press Office first.’ Bliss ripped off a corner of his doughnut. ‘I actually came up with something fairly interesting by the simple expedient of Googling Clement Ayling.’

‘Not relating to his council work?’

‘Well, yeh, but not in quite the same way.’ Bliss looked at the segment of doughnut, then put it back on his plate as dark jam seeped down his fingers. ‘In my desperation to remain at the forefront of the investigation, I’ve floated it to Howe. We’re waiting for a forensic report that might confirm it. In fact I may get back to you, Merrily, if it comes up positive.’

‘Me? Why?’

‘Talk about it then, if we need to. Don’t want to complicate your life unnecessarily. You’re not going away anywhere for the festive season, I take it?’

‘I work, Frannie. Night shift on Christmas Eve. We’re having a meditation into Christmas morning.’

‘What happened to Midnight Mass?’

‘That will follow. Quietly. But maybe no raucous carols until the morning.’

‘You little radical, Merrily. That’s not gonna please the drunks. Part of Christmas, staggering into church at five to twelve, belting out, “Oh Come All Ye Faithful” to the tune of “Silent Night”.’

‘Before throwing up their curry and chips over somebody’s headstone. We don’t have that kind of person in the New Cotswolds, Francis.’

‘Oh, yeh…’ Bliss fingered up some jam ‘… I was gonna tell you… Our friend Mr Jonathan Long of the Overpaid Public School Twats Division. Why he might’ve been in Ledwardine?’

‘Blimey, I’d almost forgotten. What a difference a day makes.’

‘Yeh, well, forget about it again. I was gonna tell you, but now I can’t. I’d suggested it might help if you were aware of a particular situation, but… apparently it wouldn’t. So that’s that.’

‘You’ve brought me here to tell me you can’t tell me?’

‘All I can say is, it’s a temporary thing and it’s something you’ll probably be glad you didn’t know about at the time.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Odd, though.’ Bliss licked raspberry jam from his fingers. ‘All the picturesque backwaters in all the world… and they have to pick on yours.’

He laughed.

When Merrily got in, there was a heap of Christmas cards on the mat, the post getting later and later and bigger and bigger. She sorted out the brown envelopes from the white. Only two, thank God, but one looked like the big one, the one you opened now with trembling fingers. The heating-oil bill. Couldn’t face it tonight; she put it on the hall table.

The other brown envelope, local postmark, contained a white card on which two severe-looking angels formed an archway to a tunnel. At the end of it was a glowing circle, in mauve.

The underlining of TRUE LIGHT had been done in ink. Underneath, someone had scrawled:

A poison-pen Christmas card. Unsigned, but the name of the church was familiar.

Merrily put the card back in the envelope and the envelope on the table, underneath the oil bill.

‘Thank you, Shirley.’

15 The Badge

‘Jane…’ Merrily hesitated ‘… don’t think I’m being old-fashioned, prudish, illiberal and all that stuff, but—’

‘Yeah, I do know what you’re going to say.’

Jane finished wiping down the refectory table, tossing the cloth from hand to hand. This kid who was a kid no longer. Who was, in fact, less than two years from the age Merrily had been when the pregnancy test came up positive. How terrifying was that?

‘Separate rooms,’ Jane said. ‘That would be part of the deal.’

‘It would?’

The issue had been raised after they’d eaten, washed the dishes and made some tea.

‘OK, let me be totally frank and upfront.’ Jane pulled out a chair at the kitchen table and sat down, arms folded. ‘Adult to adult.’

‘I hate it when you say that. Can’t help feeling you’ve not been one long enough to qualify for the badge.’

‘The point about Eirion,’ Jane said, ‘is I do need to know where we stand. I’ve hardly seen him since he went to university. I mean, people change, don’t they?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘When they’re mixing in like a different milieu.’

‘Erm… good word.’

‘What I’m trying to say, is that if he thinks he’s coming here to start where we left off.’

‘Left off,’ Merrily said. ‘Mmm.’

This was adult to adult, was it? She knew, of course, that Jane and Eirion’s relationship had long been consummated. In fact she knew precisely when — Eirion, in an honest, innocent and rather touching moment, having told her himself, the morning after. A summer morning, here in the vicarage kitchen, sitting at this same refectory table. Seemed a lifetime ago. It was, what — eighteen months?

Hell of a long time for teenagers, though.

‘So I said I’d ask you,’ Jane said. ‘And I have. And it’s your decision, Mum, and if it’s inconvenient or you say no for any other reason, I’m not going to take it any further. I am not going to argue.’

‘In other words, you’re saying you want me to make the decision for you.’

‘’Course n— Well, I mean your advice would obviously—’

‘Do you want to see him?’

‘Probably.’

‘Probably?’

‘Well… yeah, I do. But I just… I just feel it may not be right. That I might be looking back on it in years to come and thinking, that was when it all went wrong, that Christmas. Because Christmas is an intense kind of time, isn’t it?’

‘It can bring things to a head.’

‘Like in Hereford last night.’ Jane raised an eyebrow. ‘Head? Never mind.’ She twitched her nose. ‘Bad taste.’

‘You heard about that, then.’

‘All over the school by lunchtime. Lots of sick jokes. You know what kids are like.’

‘Erm… yeah.’

‘So what I’m really thinking is, like, are we too young to have been together for so long? That’s it, really.’

‘Sorry?’

‘That’s the dilemma.’ Jane’s mind was like a pinball machine. ‘Also, I’m thinking… you and Dad?’

‘That was entirely different.’

‘How was it different?’

‘Because we… because we’d known each other for a lot shorter time than you and Eirion and there were a lot of things about him I didn’t know, and… are you trying to embarrass me?’

Jane grinned.

‘And because you and Eirion will not, unless you’re incredibly stupid or incredibly drunk, have to get married. So unless, at some stage, you…’ Merrily slumped at the table. ‘Sorry, flower, been a difficult day. Has there been anyone else in the interim I don’t know about?’

‘He says not.’

‘No… I meant you.’

‘Me?’ Jane’s eyes widened. ‘Listen, I don’t do that any more — I mean go behind your back. And if you were thinking Neil Cooper, I quite fancied Coops. Especially when I— All right, maybe we shouldn’t be talking like this.’

‘Especially when you what?’

‘When I… found out he was married, I had a weird little fantasy about being the Other Woman. But I didn’t do anything, Mum, I didn’t make any approach and neither did he, and I’ve got past it now.’

‘Erm… good.’

‘Have I shocked you? Anyway…’ Jane sprang to her feet. ‘Let’s bring it in, shall we?’

Meaning the too-big Christmas tree that Merrily had called for at a farm shop outside the village. She’d forgotten. She prised herself to her feet as Jane went out to untie the tree from the roof-rack of the car.

‘Jane…?’ Merrily thought for a moment and then called after her. ‘OK, tell Eirion I’d be happy for him to come.’

It was a time for commitment.

She watched Jane turn and bow — ‘Thank you, single parent’ — as the phone starting ringing in the scullery.

‘Always liked Eirion. Just didn’t like to say it too often.’ Going back into the house, alone, murmuring, ‘In case it put you off him.’

‘Four television crews!’ Sophie said with distaste. ‘Marching up and down, filming the house from various angles. Reporters knocking on doors, reporters under lights, talking to the cameras. Satellite dishes! It’s quite unbearable.’

The rain chattered inanely on the window pane. Merrily shifted the Bakelite phone from one ear to the other, switching on the Anglepoise at the same time.

‘So when did they reveal his name?’

‘I don’t know. Early this evening, I think. How long will this go on, Merrily?’

‘It’ll seem like for ever, I’m afraid. But I suppose tomorrow will be the worst day. Surely they have police with Helen Ayling now?’

‘No, Merrily, she’s here.’

‘Where?’

‘Helen’s staying with us. It was, in the end, the obvious solution. The press have been encouraged to think she’s left the area, with unnamed relatives.’

‘God, Sophie, is this a good idea?’

‘It was either that or some family liaison officer in the house. Besides, I’ve discovered I’m fairly competent at driving the media from my doorstep. Wanted us — neighbours — to talk about Clement. On television.’

You could feel the shudder in the phone.

‘I noticed you went off with the police,’ Sophie said.

‘Bliss.’

‘And what did you learn?’

‘He seems to be looking for a connection with Clement Ayling’s council work. Fairly obvious, I suppose. Councillors make enemies.’

‘Yes.’ Sophie sounded calmer. ‘You were right. They begin by eliminating the spouse. And then they get to the heart of it.’

‘Which is… what?’

‘It seems that Clement had been receiving abusive letters and phone calls. In relation, as you say, to his council work. Or a particular aspect of it.’

‘What — rage against school closures? That kind of thing?’

‘Road rage, actually,’ Sophie said.

Jane insisted that a Christmas tree should only be borrowed from the earth. By the time Merrily finished on the phone, she had the tree up in the hall, surprisingly perpendicular, in one of the stone tubs from the garden. Damp soil and stones around the roots — cold enough in here to ensure survival well beyond Twelfth Night.

‘Sunday, then?’ Jane was sitting on the stairs with her mobile. ‘No, that’s fine… Yeah, it will be.’

Eirion, evidently. Merrily sensed Jane trying not to sound too affectionate. She waited in the kitchen doorway.

‘Sure. I’ll certainly tell her. No, couldn’t make it up, could you? Bloody hell. Yeah, right. Bye.’ Jane looked up. ‘He says it’s really good of you. He wanted to thank you himself, but I said you were working. Mum, look, there’s something else you—’

‘Spare me a few minutes, flower?’

‘Sure.’ Jane sprang to her feet. ‘What’s the problem?’

Jane was happy, hadn’t even objected to being addressed as ‘flower’. She stood up. Open boxes of tinsel and tree-lights sat at the foot of the tree, Ethel checking them out, pawing delicately at a coloured ball, then dancing away.

No point at all in keeping quiet about this, now Clement Ayling’s name had been released. Of course, it was nothing to do with her really, but with Sophie involved…

‘Could I consult you about something?’ Merrily said. ‘Something you know much more about than I do.’

‘Fine wines? Jane Austen? Vampire Weekend?’

‘The Rotherwas Ribbon.’

‘Oh.’

‘Or as you probably know it, the Dinedor Serpent.’

‘Say no more.’ Jane came downstairs, shedding her smile. ‘What can I tell you about those bastards?’

16 Patio Gravel

A fuzz of viridian forestry, a band of lime-green field and, in the foreground, a vast open spread of red clay where the surface had been peeled away by the road contractors.

Sitting at the scullery desk, Jane had opened up the picture to full-screen. You couldn’t see the top of Dinedor Hill, where tall trees enclosed the Iron Age camp, but you could see the Dinedor Serpent. For what it was worth.

‘This is what it was like before they covered it up again,’ Jane said.

In the middle of the exposed clay, a greyish trickle of small pebbles.

Merrily said, ‘That’s it?’

You might not agree with him, but you could see where Ayling had been coming from. Clement went with a delegation to view the site, Sophie had said. Afterwards, he was quoted in the Hereford Times as saying it just looked like, ah… patio gravel.

Succinct. And probably forgivable, if you weren’t an archaeologist. His opinion was that anyone who thought a vital relief road should be abandoned or even diverted to preserve that must be quite insane. He said that, even if it was preserved, it was hardly going to be a tourist attraction. Adding that Herefordshire Council couldn’t let itself be dictated to by hippies and outsiders.

An old-style local politician. Like Bliss said, Clem Ayling’s younger colleagues would have been crouching behind some trite press statement. Ayling would hold forth… railing against the idiots and the cranks.

Jane, of course, had been following the story from the other side, with frequent explosions of Jane-rage: another example of the jackbooted bastards at County Hall sacrificing Herefordshire’s sacred past in the cause of dubious progress. A crime against history and the environment.

But it still looked like patio gravel.

‘You’re not getting the full picture here,’ Jane said. ‘That’s not possible with hardly any of it uncovered. Take it from me — if it was fully exposed, this could be the most amazing archaeological discovery of the last century. Anywhere in the country. And far, far, far more important than another stretch of crap tarmac.’

She’d found the images on the website built by the protesters: SAVE THE SERPENT. On its homepage was a picture of what was said to be one of the only comparable monuments in the world — a hillside seen from above, with sculpted mounds on it protected by new walls. Above the picture, it said:

And below:

‘The Ohio Serpent mound is probably the only comparable monument anywhere in the world,’ Jane said. ‘That tells you how significant this is.’

‘The Dinedor Serpent’s not actual mounds like this, though, is it?’ Merrily leaned over the back of Jane’s chair. ‘It just looks like… chippings.’

‘Yeah, well, that’s what they thought at first — that it was a road, a prehistoric pathway, maybe going all the way to the top of Dinedor Hill. A ritual pathway, for ceremonial processions.’

‘Like your pathway to Cole Hill.’

‘Except Cole Hill’s only an alignment, with no actual visible path, other than the one across the meadow. And that’s a straight line, whereas the Serpent is… serpentine. But the archaeologists decided it couldn’t’ve been an actual pathway, because it has nothing under it — no base, no support. If people had walked on it, the stones would just’ve been trodden in. Wouldn’t’ve lasted a year, never mind a few thousand.’

‘So if it’s not the remains of a road or a track…? I’m sorry, I should know this, shouldn’t I?’

Ought to have paid more attention to the Serpent dispute, but other things had been happening at the time. Also, access to the site had been restricted because of the work on the new road, so few people had actually seen it. Not even Jane, apparently.

‘Everybody should know about this, but most people don’t,’ Jane said. ‘The truth is totally magical. Archaeology to die for.’ She looked up. ‘You OK, Mum?’

Sophie had said Helen Ayling remembered her husband receiving at least half a dozen angry phone calls and several abusive letters, half of them unsigned. How many had been actual threats she didn’t know. If Clement took the call, he simply hung up and wouldn’t talk about it afterwards. The letters he burned. Nothing to worry about. Part and parcel of local government service.

Bloody cranks, he’d say. As if we’d block the city’s economic development for their juvenile fairy stories.

Actually sparing the time, for once, to explain to Helen why the Rotherwas relief road was of such strategic importance, issuing as it did from Hereford’s primary industrial sector and perhaps eventually forming part of the city’s long-needed bypass.

Opening up this side of Hereford, the commercial possibilities were enormous, Clem said. Only cranks and drug-addled hippies would even want to get in its way, and at least they were relatively harmless. Sophie said Helen had been less convinced of this — recalling coming home one evening, about four months ago, and finding a message on the answering machine warning Clem to stay away from Dinedor Hill if he didn’t want to be buried there.

Dinedor Hill: implications here. The city’s mother hill, the site of its Iron Age origins. Aligned with the Cathedral in the same way that Cole Hill was aligned with Ledwardine church, but on an altogether more impressive scale. Some people in Hereford felt an almost obsessive attachment to Dinedor. Running a new road too close, cutting off the city from the mother hill, was always going to cause unrest. And if the roadwork itself had exposed even more evidence of Dinedor’s sanctity…

Sophie said Helen had been concerned enough by the tone of the message on the answering machine to hang on to the tape. Had thus been able to present the evidence to Howe when Howe brought up the issue.

‘I’m sorry,’ Merrily had said. ‘I don’t understand. Howe brought this up?’

‘Well, yes, I think so. She seems to have specifically asked Helen if Clement’s attitude to the Dinedor Serpent had led to threats.’

‘As if she already had reason to suspect the murder was Serpent-related?’

‘I thought I’d made that clear,’ Sophie said.

Merrily looked down at the seated Jane from behind, really not liking where things were going.

‘So when the Council decided to go ahead with the road… people were very angry?’

‘You think they didn’t have good reason to be?’ Jane turned her chair round. ‘Soon as the council learned about the Serpent, they hushed it up. They didn’t want it to come out until they knew they could bulldoze the road through regardless. One guy chained himself to a machine.’

‘You sure about that — that they were hushing it up?’

‘It’s obvious. They didn’t even want to hear any arguments. Wouldn’t allow any public debate. It was discussed by the so-called Cabinet behind closed doors. All we heard was this reactionary old bastard Clement Ayling going on to Midlands Today and the Hereford Times about how crap the Serpent was anyway and how it wasn’t even worth preserving.’

‘Mmm.’

‘They didn’t even take any steps to protect bits of the Serpent they’d uncovered — like against the elements? So it was all filling up with water during heavy rain, causing untold damage.’

‘But as I understand it, that’s why it needed to be covered up again, even if it was by a road — to protect it against bad weather.’

‘And people nicking stones as souvenirs, sure. But you could cover it up and still make a feature out of it. Look at Ohio. No, it was the way this was done — hushed up. And like when a few civilised protesters turned up at the council offices and refused to leave they were actually arrested? By the cops? You must remember that.’

‘Well, I do, but it came to nothing, surely? Nobody was charged.’

‘Mum… they were thrown into police cells! These were just ordinary people disgusted at the way the council was behaving. And two of the ones arrested, they were, like, over eighty?’ Jane’s eyes wide now, with outrage. ‘And some of them got taken all the way to Worcester because like there weren’t enough spare cells at Hereford? OK, the charges were withdrawn, but banging elderly people up in cells just for standing up for some kind of democracy… Like they were terrorists or something?’

‘You’re sure about this?’

‘Why do you keep saying that? Of course I’m sure. And the reason I’m sure is because some of the protesters are also members of the Coleman’s Meadow Preservation Society. Same problem, same council. I’d’ve been with them myself if it hadn’t been a school day — wow, does that sound pathetic or what?’

‘Actually, it sounds sensible. If you can cope with sensible.’

‘I should’ve been there. Wimped out.’

Jane turned back to the computer and brought up another SAVE THE SERPENT page, which said:

Merrily stood looking at it, but not seeing it. Seeing the greater pattern. Dinedor Serpent/Coleman’s Meadow. The trouble with this county, it was just too damn small. Everything interconnected. Everything eventually trickling down into your own community, your own home, your—

‘Mum! You’re digging your fingers into my shoulders!’

‘I… sorry.’

‘OK.’ Jane stood up. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘You mentioned Clement Ayling.’

‘Fascist of the first order. We truly live in a police state, you know? Nobody’s allowed to object to anything any more. I mean, you only have to look at pictures of Ayling with his phoney smile, the smug, fat, arrogant—’

‘Jane.’

‘What?’

‘Sit down, huh?’

17 River of Light

They dressed the tree. A pagan ceremony, Jane always used to say, and she was probably right.

Merrily climbed on a chair to attach their slightly frayed Christmas fairy, or maybe angel, to the topmost branch. She thought of the offerings at Whiteleafed Oak in the Malverns. She thought of the little lights that were supposed to be visible in the orchard here in Ledwardine, where cider apples known as the Pharisees Red had been grown. Pharisees from farises — local slang for fairies.

As if we’d block the city’s economic development for their juvenile fairy stories.

Jane was applying herself, with serious, numbed concentration, to the decoration of the tree. When she’d spoken it was only to point out that they needed more glass balls or strands of tinsel.

You could almost hear her mind turning over and over like an engine trying to start. And then she said, as if the words had just drifted out, ‘Do what thou wilt, though it harm none.’

She had the Christmas tree lights stretching up the stairs to untangle the wire.

‘That would be the motto of the Pagan Federation?’ Merrily said.

‘Actually, it’s a Wiccan saying. But, yeah, if they had a motto it would be something like that.’

‘Right.’

If you were a vicar, a parish priest in the Christian faith, and you were fully aware that your daughter was wearing, next to her skin, a fine silver necklace with a pentacle hanging from it, what were you supposed to do about that? Come over all Shirley West? Ban her from keeping pagan books in your vicarage? Watch her every move, find out who she was meeting, phoning, keep a check on her emails and pray for her deliverance from the arms of Satan?

Or did you, seeing through to the person underneath, remember when you were a teenage Siouxie and the Banshees fan in black lipstick and let it, for God’s sake, lie?

‘Mum, these lights are just not coming on.’

‘They never come on first time. You have to go round screwing every one in tight, and then… pray.’ Merrily came down from the chair. ‘So what you’re trying to say is… no supporter of the Dinedor Serpent or the Coleman’s Meadow stones — and certainly no modern British pagan — would even contemplate something so brutal and barbaric.’

‘You think they would?’

‘I wouldn’t know, Jane. Some of the modern pagans I’ve encountered, it would be difficult to imagine them sacrificing lunch. But if you look at their forebears in the Dark Ages…’

‘Which weren’t dark, but go on.’

‘If you look at ancient Celtic paganism, as practised, presumably, by the Iron Age people who lived in their round huts on the top of Dinedor Hill… and Cole Hill, come to that—’

‘So that would be like two thousand years ago? Three thousand?’

‘Whatever, they were very into removing heads, the old pagans, weren’t they?’

‘No!’

‘All I’m—’

‘That’s disgusting!’ Jane glared down from the stairs, holding the dead lights. ‘I don’t know anyone who could do that.’

‘Well, I don’t either, so let’s not worry too much about it. It’s all circumstantial, anyway.’

‘These are gentle people. Well-meaning.’ Jane looked down at the limp necklace of bulbs. ‘They’re just people who think we should be aware of our origins.’

‘Well, me too, but—’

‘And like just pushing out cities and towns and villages in all directions, ruining the countryside for more and more houses and factories that close down after a couple of years… that’s just mindless. Building that road is… thrusting a spear into the countryside.’

Merrily sighed.

‘It’s like nobody ever really thinks any more,’ Jane said. ‘Like the way they just went into Iraq and nobody considered the consequences. Nobody thought.’

Tears in Jane’s eyes.

The fairy lights blinked once and then came on, like jewels on her fingers. She looked down at them.

‘God, it’s just like the Serpent.’

‘Sorry?’

‘It’s like… I never told you, did I? Let me show you, OK?’

Jane picked up the end of the wire and dragged the lights up the stairs to the first landing, where she took off one of her trainers. She wrapped the end of the wire around it to hold it firm on the landing, and then came downstairs backwards, arranging the lights.

Somehow, they all stayed on.

‘This is how it worked, right? The theory is that the Serpent may run all the way from the top of Dinedor Hill down to the River Wye.’

‘How far’s that?’

‘Not as far as you’d think. So it’s connecting what, in ancient times, would have been the two main features in the landscape, pre-Hereford — the biggest hill and the river. The most important river in the west of England and Wales, so very sacred. And the wavy pattern of the Serpent is actually simulating the meandering of the river.’

‘Who’s saying that?’

‘That’s come from the archaeologists themselves — the guys in charge of the rescue excavation. I got it from Coops. Obviously, they’ve only uncovered a small section of the Serpent, but that’s what they reckon. These guys don’t say anything until it’s looking pretty solid.’

‘I see…’

‘I don’t think you do. Not yet. Listen… this is the cool part — the little stones include fragments of quartz, which was probably quarried in the area. So if you imagine this river of stones — with a high quartz content — rising from the Wye, across Rotherwas. Imagine Rotherwas when there were no factories there, no warehouses, only open countryside. So imagine the river rising up the side of Dinedor Hill. Now…’

Jane went across the landing and snapped off the lamp over the stairwell.

‘… Imagine a full moon…’

Before her eyes adjusted, Merrily saw this shining chain against smoky blackness. Ascending lights.

‘On the night of a full moon,’ Jane said, ‘all the fragments of quartz would’ve been reflecting the light. So you’d be seeing like tens of thousands of little lights. An incandescent stream down the sacred hill to the banks of the Wye. You see?’

‘The whole Serpent lights up? That’s what it was for?’

‘Awesome, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ Merrily said. ‘It must have been.’

Light against darkness. My God.

Realising that Jane had said something about this before but it hadn’t really registered. There really wasn’t anything like this, was there, possibly anywhere in the world?

‘Jane, why was this not talked about?’

‘Because the council kept it quiet. You think they wanted everybody to know how exciting it was? Mum, it’s like Bill Blore said, these people are not fit to make decisions on anything important. Anything you can’t take to the bank they don’t even understand.’

That night, as the squally rain spat at the bedroom window, Merrily lay awake, thinking about the Serpent, the stones of Coleman’s Meadow and several other recent finds suggesting a rich, unsuspected, ancient heritage along the Welsh border. When you considered the emotive and mystical power of this illuminated umbilical cord and the impact of its severance by a road carrying heavy commercial traffic…

Who cared?

Not the council, evidently. Most of them probably hoping the serpent would be washed away by the rain.

‘It’s clear what’s happening, isn’t it?’ Jane had said, when they’d put the lights back on the tree. ‘Hereford’s pagan past is rising again, all around us — and it’s more beautiful and spectacular than anyone ever dreamed. And they hate that.’

‘The Council?’

‘The Council, the secular state. And the Church, what’s left of it.’

Ah, yes, the Church. All this was pre-Christian, not the Church’s problem — official.

And whatever was in Coleman’s Meadow wasn’t a problem for the Vicar of Ledwardine. Yet the beauty and — yes — the sanctity of it all… Jane was right, nothing of spiritual value should be discarded. Whether or not you could understand it, there was something you could feel. Something to seize and lift the spirit.

Archaeology to die for.

But archaeology to kill for?

Merrily rolled over. She’d forgotten her hot-water bottle, was feeling chilled, like the vicarage would always be, and she was resisting the warm fantasy of being across the road in Lol’s little terraced house, in the little cosy bedroom with Lol’s warm—

‘Mum?’

The landing light had come on, and Jane stood in the bedroom doorway, bare-legged, a fleece around her shoulders. Flashback to the days after Sean’s death, when she’d stand, bemused, in another bedroom doorway, hugging her oldest teddy.

‘Mum, I forgot — sorry.’

‘What time is it?’

‘Only about half-twelve.’

‘Oh, only half-twelve and you having to go to school in the morning, even if it is the last day of term—’

‘Mum, I forgot, OK? I was going to tell you about it before you asked me about the Serpent and all this Clem Ayling stuff came up, and it got… pushed out.’

‘Couldn’t it have waited till morning?’

‘We never seem to have time in the morning, and I want to check the river, and—’

‘OK.’ Merrily reached over to the bedside chair for her bathrobe. ‘Tell me. Quickly.’

‘It was this woman I met yesterday morning. In the churchyard?’

‘You’ve never mentioned a woman.’

‘No, it didn’t seem important, and I was late and… Anyway, she called herself Lensi, and she had this posh camera. Said she was a press photographer, freelance, working for… I think it was the Independent? She knew about the stones, and she, like, she wants to take some pictures of me?’

‘Not another one.’

‘Yeah, well, I didn’t encourage her, I’m a low-profile person now.’

‘Can’t actually say I’ve noticed.’

‘Anyway, I asked Eirion if he could check her out with his media friends? And, good as gold, he did, and when I rang to tell him it was OK to come at the weekend he told me who he thought she was.’

‘Madonna?’

Merrily dragged the robe around her shoulders as Jane came into the bedroom, pushed the door to behind her and sat down at the bottom of the bed.

‘She says people call her Lensi, right?’

‘You said that. And why am I interested?’

‘That’s what I said to her.’

‘What?’

‘I’m like, why are you interested? This was when she started asking questions like, what sort of pagan are you, Jane?’

‘Oh God.’

‘I didn’t tell her. Not that I’m any kind of pagan, anyway. It’s just like an ethos, isn’t it? But it came up, because she’d been asking about the stones and Lucy Devenish. And then you, a bit.’

‘Me?’

‘She obviously knew who you were. And, like, Eirion always says if you avoid answering journalists’ questions it’ll only make them think you’re covering something up and they won’t let it go.’

‘Jane—’

‘Anyway, Eirion knows this guy who’s like Wales correspondent for the Indy? And he knows this woman photographer who calls herself Lensi. Like, nobody else calls her that… it’s about giving herself this kind of professional-photographer image? They used to laugh at her, didn’t take her seriously because she was posh. Rich family in the country. Finishing school, that kind of thing.’

‘And what exactly was the posh photographer doing poking around the churchyard?’

‘She lives here. This is the point. She’s renting Cole Barn. With her husband.’

‘Well, yeah, I heard that had been let, but—’

‘They’ve been here several weeks. Eirion says her real name’s Leonora Phelan. But it’s her husband you’re more likely to have heard of. Mathew Stooke?’

Merrily sat up. The strip of yellow light from the landing was like a knife blade.

‘Yes, that Mathew Stooke,’ Jane said. ‘We’re pretty sure.’