To Dream of the Dead

34 Recovery Space

Life always speeded up before Christmas. Not yet dawn, but the top end of the secret bypass was already a red river of tail lights.

Bliss could remember when all this used to be country, but good flat land didn’t stay green-belt for long. North-west of the city, a mesh of unexplained roads had appeared. No signposts, but what it amounted to was another unpublicised back way round the city, and housing had sprouted around it like pink fungi.

These were the more expensive properties, detached and set back from the road but still built too close together, with shared driveways. Bliss and the van parked round the corner.

As they walked up the drive, a landing light came on in a central upstairs window. Soft red walls, a glimmering in the bubble glass in the front door, and you knew all the radiators would be coming on, and those reassuring standby lights in the big, tidy kitchen.

Bliss thought of his own cold, messed-up kitchen, the heating clock he’d never had to master before. He wiped his mind, like with a wet cloth, and pulled himself into the situation.

Dawn raid. The go go go stuff. Coppers in face-shield headgear like international cricketers. The front door splintering under the enforcer. Police! Police! Police! Like the FBI without the weaponry.

Some part of Bliss would have quite liked all that. Meanwhile, in the real world…

Under his porch light, Mr Banks-Jones, up surprisingly early after last night’s party over at Tupsley, was struggling with the Sunday papers, a too-thick bundle rammed into a too-thin letter box. Clearly unable to pull them through from the inside, he’d come out.

‘Idiots. Nobody takes any care at all any more. Look at the way the Observer’s torn all the way—’ He looked over his shoulder, exasperated, then quickly straightened up. ‘Oh. I’m so sorry, I thought you were my neighbour.’

‘West Mercia Police, sir,’ Bliss said. ‘Are you Gyles Banks-Jones?’

One of the uniforms was already round the back, on the off chance that Mrs Banks-Jones was on her way down a drainpipe with a carrier bag full of recreational drugs. Gyles stood there in the rain, in his dressing gown, a thin, studious-looking guy in early middle age.

‘Oh, lord. I knew this would happen one day. But… Christmas?’

‘Life is unfair, Mr Jones,’ Bliss said. ‘All right if we pop inside?’

‘Look… I’ve got two young children.’

‘Snap. DI Francis Bliss, my name, and this is DC Wintle, who attended the same party as you last night. Undercover.’

‘How do you do. I, ah…’ Gyles Banks-Jones swallowed, moistened his lips. ‘Any chance we can be civilised about this?’

It wasn’t a lot, really. Bliss wasn’t well-up on current street prices, but he reckoned no more than about six grand. Plastic bags in the velvet linings of jewel boxes stacked in Gyles’s workshop extension, back of the house.

He’d showed them where to look, then had sat down next to his wife on the sofa downstairs. His kids had slept through it all.

Now, in the interview room. Gyles, gardening fleece over his denim shirt, was telling Bliss that while it wasn’t all for personal use, he would certainly object very strongly to being called a dealer.

‘If it’s just for your friends,’ Bliss said, George Wintle silent at his side, ‘you seem to have quite a wide social circle.’

‘Inspector Bliss,’ the solicitor said, ‘I believe my client has told you—’

‘And I don’t believe him, Mr Bilton,’ Bliss said.

The solicitor looked about nineteen. Glasses, puppy fat, new briefcase and an earring. He’d materialised unusually rapidly for a Sunday morning; even so, Gyles Banks-Jones was in a fairly frayed state by then. As anyone would be, exposed to the smelly street-scrapings occupying the neighbouring cells two days short of Christmas.

‘Mr Bliss,’ Gyles said, ‘I realise that the law of the land obliges you to regard me as a common criminal, but society—’

‘Please do not give me society, Gyles. You can help me, or you can be difficult… with whatever effect that may have on the length of your sentence.’

‘Now that’s ridiculous. Do you think I’m naive? I watch the news, I read the papers. Nobody goes to prison these days for a first offence of… of this nature. The prisons are overcrowded. Everybody knows that.’ Gyles flashing an imploring glance at his solicitor, but the solicitor pretended he was searching for something in his case. Bliss — leaning back, hands behind his head — let the silence inflate like a breath-test kit, and then he yawned.

‘Gyles. Little toe-rags from one-parent families, with only five convictions for TWOC and crack by the age of seventeen — they don’t go to prison, on account of the System says we have to give them a chance to turn their little lives around. Respectable, middle-class, liberal-minded gentlemen with good incomes, however, who sadly fall from grace just the once…’ Bliss dropped his hands, sat up hard. ‘Bang! That was your cell door, Gyles. I’d say five months.’

Enjoying this now. The day having totally turned around when they were leaving Gyles’s place in daylight and he’d looked up at a window of the house across the double drive, and seen a face peering out.

Gyles looked at his solicitor, who clicked his case shut and set it down beside his chair.

‘How do you collect the coke?’ Bliss said.

‘They… bring it to my shop. In cardboard boxes. Cardboard boxes I’ve given them. As if it’s supplies from a wholesaler.’

Banks-Jones’s had turned out to be the jewellers — oh, the irony of it — from whom they’d bought Kirsty’s engagement ring. Gyles’s dad had run the shop, back then.

‘And when you say they…?’

No answer. For the first time, Bliss smelled fear. There was a particular person here that Gyles really did not want to finger. Someone who very much knew where he lived.

‘How was it sourced, Gyles? Take me back. How’d you make the first contact?’

‘I… I teach at the art college, one day a week. Jewellery. Someone I met there… I can’t—’ Gyles shook his head as though he’d just woken up. ‘I can’t do this. I have to live in this city. These people are not criminals.’

‘Who aren’t?’

‘Certainly none of the people at last night’s party. Or the person who introduced me to… to…’

‘… To the real criminals?’

‘We keep them at very much arm’s length. None of us can be seen to… We’re all either self-employed, with all the stress that involves these days, or with taxing jobs. We’re not… lowlife. It’s about relaxation, unwinding… recovery space.’

Bliss said, ‘You’re a twat, Gyles. You know that?’

‘Do you know what some of these people are like?’

‘Jes — Of course I know what these people are like. On which basis, I’d far rather put them away than you. So let’s start again, shall we? Play your cards right, you could be home for Christmas dinner — which I’d guess tastes better from a nice plate rather than one of them tin trays with little compartments. So let’s talk about the friends and neighbours whose senses you help to stimulate. Would that include the man next door, by any chance?’

‘Why can’t you just charge me and—?’

‘Let you go round and warn everybody? Please, Gyles, don’t insult my intelligence. You know what I’m after.’

‘Look… I keep my distance. I don’t try to get to know them. And if I’d known what sort of people they were, I would never have—’

‘How do you know what sort of people they are?’

‘I know where they live. Roughly.’

‘Let me take a wild guess — the Plascarreg? Don’t worry, I gather nobody can get out of there today, with the Belmont roundabout only open for canoes.’

‘This is unbearable,’ Gyles Banks-Jones said. ‘This is an absolute nightmare.’

35 Paganus

Paganism was all over this church: glistening in the holly on the sills, glowing dully in the red apple held by Eve in a window that was more about orchard fertility than original sin.

Merrily paused, looking down into the central aisle, meeting nobody’s eyes. She had some lights on, high in the rafters over the nave, and a couple of spots. Say it.

‘Last week, I was virtually accused of being one.’

A pagan.

Better if there’d been more people to hear it, but the Sunday before Christmas you rarely got many in church. And it would get around — these things always did.

Secretly standing on a hassock, Merrily gripped the sides of a high Gothic pulpit that was too big for her. Never really liked the pulpit. A glorified play-fort.

She’d told them there were things that needed saying about Coleman’s Meadow. What it meant for the village.

About thirty-five punters; could be worse with Sunday opening, all those last-minute presents to buy. Which reminded her, with a jolt, that she’d need to get over to Knights Frome to pick up the Boswell guitar. Could she fit that in before tonight’s meditation?

No — phew — it was OK. No Sunday evening meditation this week; it was happening on Christmas Eve instead. Tomorrow. God. The medieval sandstone walls seemed to close together under the lights, crushing her like a moth.

She closed her eyes, drew a breath. The noise in the windows was like a battering of arrows. The relentless thuggery of the rain had awoken her well before the sky was diluted into daylight, so vicious you expected to find craters in the road. She raised her voice against it. ‘Most of us will be aware of the archaeologists who started work yesterday. They could even be working this morning — I don’t think I see any of them here.’

Just as well, perhaps.

Last night had been almost unprecedented. Jane looking cowed, hunted. Not even angry, just… dulled and unreachable. From the moment they’d got back Eirion had kept looking at Merrily, his eyes clouded with worry, wide with mute appeal: do something.

In the end, Lol had created an opening, announcing he’d had an unexpected cheque from album sales in Germany. Enough to buy them all dinner at the Black Swan.

Jane had looked immediately panicked, said she was, like, really tired? Merrily, throwing Lol a glance, had said why didn’t he and Eirion go to the Swan, talk music and stuff? Eirion having met Lol before he’d even known Jane, back when he was in a schoolboy rock band with the son of Lol’s psychotherapist friend Dick Lyden. Merrily thinking that if she didn’t get the full facts out of Jane, Lol would at least hear it from Eirion.

When they’d gone she’d built up the fire in the parlour, and they’d sat for two hours going over the implications.

‘The bottom line,’ Merrily told Lol on the phone, after midnight, ‘is that this has virtually destroyed archaeology for her. It’s something she’s never going to forget — or be allowed to. And if you take away the possibility of some ancient magic in the distant past and all you’re left with is…’

‘Bits of pottery and old bones,’ Lol said. ‘Not enough for Jane.’

‘I can’t believe he could do that to her.’

She’d been on the mobile in her bedroom, Eirion and Jane in their separate beds a floor apart. Presumably.

‘She was in the way,’ Lol said. ‘He’d had a bad morning, and Jane was in the way.’

‘And the dowser he threatened to impale on his own rods?’

‘Just warming up. Jane tell you how relaxed he was afterwards, when he’d turned it around?’

‘And that tells you what? As a psychotherapist.’

‘Failed psychotherapist. It may, of course, be nothing to do with psychology, just cold professionalism. It’s the Trench One format, isn’t it, now? It’s had to become one of those programmes founded on friction, confrontation.’

‘Cruelty.’

‘But the victims have to look like they deserve it. I’m guessing Blore had been encouraging Jane to get carried away with her own discovery, so she’d come over as a bit… you know, precocious, full of herself. Get the audience on Blore’s side before he…’

‘Takes her down?’

‘With a beautifully timed joke. At the end of a sequence leaving him looking witty and sharp. Couldn’t’ve been better with a script.’

‘You think maybe there was a script?’

‘Probably nothing that formal, but the way Eirion told it, it just struck me that the student had been set up as a feed. Obviously, you’d never prove that. And if you could… so what? It’s Blore’s job.’

‘To make an eighteen-year-old girl feel two feet high?’

‘I had to stop Eirion going for him in the pub.’

‘Blore was there?’

Merrily supposed that was why Jane hadn’t wanted to go near the Swan.

‘Mr Conviviality,’ Lol said. ‘Buying nearly as many drinks as he consumed. Eirion wanted to threaten him with bad publicity. It wouldn’t’ve helped. Eirion’s not a journalist yet. Blore would’ve swatted him like a wasp.’

‘You think there’s anything we can do to stop it going out?’

‘Probably not by appealing to his sense of moral decency. He’s not going to throw away five minutes of great telly.’

‘No.’

The worst thing about this was that Jane would feel she couldn’t go back to Coleman’s Meadow as long as Blore and his crew were there. So she probably wouldn’t see the stones raised. Her stones.

It had taken Merrily another hour and a half to get to sleep, and then the rain had awoken her twice before she’d given up, struggled into her robe and gone down to make tea before the dawn had arrived like industrial smoke, and the rain had really set in.

Enough of the congregation had been at the parish meeting and knew this already, but it bore repeating.

‘Coleman’s Meadow,’ Merrily said, ‘was already seen as quite a controversial issue because the archaeology could, if it was significant enough, prevent housing development in the village. But there are other possible housing sites, so that’s not so vitally important.’

Except to the people who knew that only full development of Coleman’s Meadow could swiftly open the way for the kind of serious, large-scale expansion that would very soon become unstoppable. A lot of money at stake here, and she was tempted to talk about that… but, although Lyndon Pierce wasn’t here, it would get back to him. And his lawyers.

‘The other reason for controversy is that what’s being uncovered is a pagan site. Again, not that many people would see this as a problem.’ Who, in fact, apart from Shirley West? She didn’t look at Shirley in the corner of a pew halfway down the nave in her padded raincoat, but she could feel Shirley looking at her. A public figure now, the postmistress, status.

‘But, because this is basically a religious issue, I suppose I should be the one to address it.’

Focusing on James Bull-Davies because he wasn’t looking at her. James was in the old Bull family pew, an elbow on the prayer-book rack, head lowered into forked forefingers, listening. Two rows behind him, Jim and Brenda Prosser glanced at one another.

Merrily had called in at the shop just before eight, on the way to Holy Communion, and Jim had shown her the Sunday paper spreads.

The Sunday Telegraph was the only paper to connect the Dinedor Serpent with the Tara Hill row in Ireland, quoting the poet Seamus Heaney and other luminaries on the way that determinedly secular governments, fuelled by fat bags of Euro-loot, were happy to lay tarmac over sacred ground.

In Hereford, the chairperson of the Save the Serpent group was quoted as saying, They’re cutting the ancient umbilical between Hereford and its mother hill.

Lower down, a local landowner said, with some bitterness, If this road was in danger of going through a mosque we’d be diverting it without a second thought.

But had Clem Ayling actually been killed because of his ridiculing of the Serpent? The Telegraph feature writer, maintaining his distance and a healthy irony, had discovered a woman called Sara Starkey, described as a Wiccan High Priestess. Sara, whom Merrily had never encountered, hadn’t held back.

Merrily had smiled. Got that one right, then.

But it was interesting, the way the pagan aspect had been emphasised. You’d think nobody else cared. But even Jane’s database suggested that the majority of the Coleman’s Meadow protesters were people with no obvious spiritual affiliation, simply an interest in prehistory and heritage, and the Dinedor Serpent campaigners were likely to be even more orthodox. However, somebody — very probably Annie Howe, via the police press office — had inflated the religious angle. Hence yesterday’s headlines about pagan nutters.

The Telegraph had a picture of Sara, a sharp-faced middle-aged woman with long straight hair standing on the earthen ramparts of Dinedor hill fort.

Retribution they’d leave to the gods.

Before Lol and Eirion came back from the pub, Merrily had asked Jane about the worst the cops might find on the Coleman’s Meadow database.

‘Do you want me to tell the media that the police took away the computer? I’m prepared to do that. They haven’t brought it back, have they?’

‘No way,’ Jane had said. ‘That would just make you look like…’ the kid had found the first and last smile of the night ‘… one of us.’

It wasn’t going to be Stonehenge, Merrily said, but even a few modest standing stones re-erected after many centuries — so many centuries that they’d vanished from recorded history — would inevitably be a presence in the village.

‘Even if they’re not as high as me, we’re looking at a significant ancient monument. So was this a pagan monument, buried because it had been seen as anti-Christian? Or because this was a nice flat field and the stones were getting in the way of somebody’s plough? OK, let’s deal with pagan. What do we mean by pagan?’

Quick sweep of the congregation. No significant reaction. Shirley West was no longer looking at her. Shirley was hunched, her head bowed, still as an obelisk.

‘The dictionary tells us — just to be sure, I looked it up this morning — that the word comes from the Latin, paganus, meaning a rustic or peasant. Meaning ordinary people. Like the people who lived here, in this community, before the time of Jesus. Pre-Christian. And what does that mean? Means they didn’t have the benefit of having known about Jesus Christ, who introduced the human race to a new dimension of love, a new understanding of what love can mean. This was sophisticated stuff, and maybe their society wasn’t ready for it.’ Merrily stood on tiptoe on the hidden hassock, leaned over the battlements of the play-fort.

‘But does that mean they were bad people who lived in darkness and sin, with no possibility of eternal life? I don’t think so. I look at where these stones were positioned, possibly to catch the first rays of the midsummer sun when it rose over Cole Hill. These were people who had no doctrine to follow, no commandments. Only their feelings. And their feelings told them to reach for the light. And that’s good enough for me.’

She looked across at the stained-glass window of Eve with the apple, still, unfortunately, brown and unlustred. Bloody rain.

‘I’m not inclined to worry about pagans, past or present. They at least represent some kind of spirituality. The Bronze Age people were aware of higher forces, which they responded to. These were the people who first developed this community, then kept it going, fed it, tended livestock, planted the first orchards… created what our old friend Lucy Devenish, taking her cue from the poet Thomas Traherne, used to call the Orb.’

She looked up at the apple shapes outlined in the filigree of the rood screen.

‘What did Lucy mean by that? I think she was talking about the idea of Ledwardine as a living organism sustained by an energy and an intelligence beyond ours. Don’t know about you, but I’d tend to call that God.’

Down at the bottom of the nave, the latch went up on the main door, with a clank, and rain swept in, bringing with it Gomer Parry in his old gabardine mac that was soaked through and tied at the waist with baler twine. Gomer shut the door behind him, took off his flat cap, drips falling onto the worn skull indented into the memorial stone of John Jenkyn, d. seventeen hundred and something. Gomer and the stone spotlit from above.

‘All I know for certain,’ Merrily said, ‘is that this — this church — became and remains the centre of the Ledwardine orb. So I’d say let’s do it. Let’s raise the stones, because they’re about the dawning of spirituality in Ledwardine — that first reaching for the light. I think they can only strengthen us.’

She looked down at the sermon pad, which she hadn’t consulted once. She saw Shirley West stand up, as grey and still as the pillars.

‘Can we sing number fourteen in your carol book. “In the Bleak Midwinter”. Softly wind made—’

‘You are disgusting.’

Shirley’s forefinger quivering, before she turned and went scuttling down the aisle, pushing past Gomer to get to the door, and Edna Huws hit the opening chords.

Gomer shambled up the aisle as Merrily came down from the pulpit. They met at the bottom of the chancel steps.

‘Quick word, vicar,’ Gomer said under some ragged, nervy singing. ‘Only I needs to get back, see.’

In the old days, the bells would have been rung.

Clanging down the valley, peeling through the rain, to be echoed by the bells of Weobley and Dilwyn and Pembridge and Eardisland. A chain of warning, ley lines of alarm spearing across the county.

Merrily went back into the pulpit. Let them finish. Stay calm. James Bull-Davies had seen Gomer. He was looking watchful, not singing. An Army man.

In the old days, the Bulls would have known what to do.

Shirley West’s outburst… in a couple of minutes even that would be forgotten.

Merrily let the old carol soak away into the sandstone.

‘Erm… something you should all know.’

There needed to be a prayer, but would anyone bother to stay for it?

36 Out

Jane stood near the top of Church Street, on the edge of the cobbles, and watched him coming out.

There was this huge, almost peaceful sense of… relief? Beyond the amplified drumming of the rain on the hood of her parka, everything was awesomely silent.

An almost religious hush. A transformation.

It was as if he’d known this had always belonged to him and now, having repossessed it, was turning it into a different place: a drowned dreamscape, an alternative village, Ledwardine-on-Sea.

The village-hall car park was like a harbour, litter bins three-parts submerged like lobster pots. A couple of guys were dumping sandbags around the hall’s entrance, Uncle Ted in fisherman’s waders quietly directing operations, the swollen scene doused in shades of grey and brown.

Jane, at first, was stunned and then dismayed.

It had all happened within a couple of hours… on the first morning when self-pity had sapped her will to go down at first light and talk to the river.

Even last night with Eirion had just been an excuse to get out of the house; there’d been no contact. Guilt — it was ridiculous but it was there. She’d released something huge, by default. Broken off contact, and now he was out.

Like he’d come looking for her.

She said to Eirion, ‘I suppose you’ve seen all this before?’

‘Common enough in the Valleys, Jane.’

‘Not here.’

OK, it wasn’t exactly a tsunami, and the water hadn’t reached any houses yet, and you could still just about see where the river ended and the flooding began. But it was scary. You could smell it, too, she was sure you could smell it. Something dank. The river had always looked clean; this wasn’t.

No traffic noise — that explained the hush. No motorists attempting to leave the village, from the south anyway. Well, they couldn’t. Across the street Lol had appeared in his doorway, casual, hands in the pockets of his jeans. Raising a hand to Jane and Eirion as an elderly guy Jane didn’t recognise started bawling at him through the rain.

‘Anybody informed the authorities?’

‘Probably, but they could be overstretched,’ Lol said. ‘If it’s happening here, it’s happening all over the county.’

‘But it’s not supposed to happen here.’ The man was struggling with an umbrella. ‘We were formally assured it never happened here. We’ve come down for Christmas, brought everything… wine, turkey…’

One of the second-homers, who’d pushed up house prices. Jane’s sympathy dissipating.

‘How soon before it goes down again?’ the man said, outraged. ‘We can’t afford to get stranded here.’

‘Hard to say,’ Lol told him, ‘as it’s never happened before. But as long as you can get to the bypass, you’re—’

The rest of it was mangled under the grinding clatter and rumble of the first vehicle coming through the new Church Street pond, maybe the only one that could.

Jane went cold, thinking about what the man driving it had said the other night when they were on the bridge.

‘Oh my God, Irene, I dreamed of the dead!’

‘Well, that’s you, Jane,’ Eirion said. ‘I wouldn’t expect you to dream of soft green meadows and bunny rabbits.’

‘A sign of rain.’

‘What?’

‘To dream of the dead is a sign of rain.’

‘You needed signs?’

She’d dreamed of Lucy Devenish. Lucy standing by her own grave, her poncho torn and muddied, and when Jane had tried to talk to her Lucy had just looked right through her, towards the orchard, as if it was Jane who wasn’t there. And in that moment of terrifying non-existence she’d awoken, desolate.

‘It’s like war’s been declared.’

Eirion was pointing up towards the square, where people, including Mum in her black cape, were starting to gather near the market hall, a couple of women holding kids back.

‘They’ve come out of church, that’s all,’ Jane said.

No voices trailed from the assembly. Eirion was right; this was what it must’ve been like when war was declared. They’d all known in their hearts that it was coming. And now the bell ringers were starting up, all bright and Merry Christmassy. Like the dance band on the Titanic. It should be a solemn dong, dong, dong, a warning toll wadded in cloud to freeze everybody into stillness and dread. Before they all turned as one, pointing down the street at Jane. She did this. She let it happen.

‘Well…’ Eirion looked up. ‘This is going to curtail Blore’s dig.’

‘He’ll probably just erect some huge marquee over the whole site.’

‘You want to go and see?’

‘No!’

‘Be a good time,’ Eirion said. ‘There’s nothing we can do here.’

‘It’s not my place any more. It’s his. Blore’s.’

‘You don’t think that. Not in a million years.’

‘Doesn’t matter what I think. I count for nothing. The sodding cops have got my database, Blore’s got my… my future. Squashed in his big hand.’

‘Oh, Jane, come on, let’s not…’

‘Not what?’

Eirion pushed back the hood of his yellow slicker, gripped her arms above the elbows.

‘You can’t, see. You bloody can’t.’

‘What?’

‘Let it go. Abandon it. Even Lol said that. There’s too much… emotional investment.’

‘Like, wow,’ Jane said sourly.

‘When we did those pictures in the summer, you were just… lit up. I was…’ Letting go of Jane’s arms. ‘I wanted to kick uni into touch, get a job as a gardener or something, just to keep on seeing you.’

He backed away, embarrassed now. She looked into his face, taut with adult anxieties and things he probably wasn’t sure he was ready to handle. She didn’t know what to say, shaken by his intensity and all churned up like the river man with whom she’d tried to fake a relationship.

Probably fortunate that Gwyneth came rattling alongside, her bucket pulled into her big yellow chest, GOMER PARRY PLANT HIRE in green on her flanks. Gomer leaning over to the open side of the cab, glasses gleaming.

‘Takin’ her up the square, Janey. Hold the high ground, see.’

‘Your bungalow’s not—?’

‘No, no, but I en’t takin’ no chances with this ole girl.’ Gomer beamed at Eirion. ‘’Ow’re you, boy?’

‘I’m OK, thanks, Gomer. And you’re looking—’

‘Good boy!’

Gomer raising a hand, Gwyneth clanking off towards the cobbles.

Eirion shaking his head, bemused.

‘He looks kind of… energised?’

‘He is,’ Jane said. ‘Some people go on about him being too old to be doing what he does, but they won’t be saying that now, because a JCB’s about the only vehicle that can get through deep flood water. It’s got the weight, and its exhaust pipe’s really high up.’

And Gomer Parry had the only one in the village. Jane watched the JCB crawling onto the cobbles, Gomer jumping down like somebody thirty years younger.

‘Helps to feel needed, doesn’t it?’

‘You think Coleman’s Meadow doesn’t need you, Jane?’

Jane said nothing.

‘Who’s it got left?’

‘It’s a field. That’s all it is.’

‘Come on. Please.’

‘Why? What’s the point?’

‘It’s like a pilot getting back into the cockpit after a crash.’

‘I was never in the sodding cockpit.’

‘You were. You found it. The whole set-up. You were led to it.’

‘New Age bullshit, Irene. Pure accident. Even you don’t believe it.’

‘I’m not clever enough on this issue to know one way or another, but I believe in… well, in you, anyway. The you that gets excited about… Look, if we go halfway, I’ll take a look first, OK? If the bastard’s there I’ll come back and we’ll forget it.’

‘Irene, I don’t…’

‘You do, Jane.’

Rain on his face making it look like he was in tears. The old Eirion, somehow.

‘And Lucy Devenish is dead,’ he said.

In a situation like this, Merrily thought, feudalism rose again. James Bull-Davies was too impoverished now to be much of a squire, but it was in his blood, and she was glad to see him taking control.

‘Panic’s premature — chances are it won’t get much higher.’

James, in his holed and etiolated Barbour, talking on the square to a couple of migrant mulled-winos she didn’t recognise.

‘Only village hall in the firing line so far.’ He looked around. ‘Where’s that bloody Pierce? Suggest he gets off his arse and onto his council. Uses whatever influence he’s got to get us some technical assistance.’

‘No chance o’ that.’ Gomer Parry took out his roll-up, cupped in his palm against the rain. ‘Pierce don’t give a monkey’s for the hall getting flooded. He wants a new one, with squashy courts. Part of his master plan. Ole hall sinks, supermarket gets the site, Pierce fills his pockets. You know that, boy.’

‘You may not be wrong, Gomer, but this is hardly the time for politics.’ James nodded at Gwyneth. ‘That thing fully functional?’

‘Wash your mouth out,’ Gomer said.

Merrily smiled, pulled the bottom of her cape out of a puddle and stepped under the market hall.

‘What can I do, James? How many people do you need at the village hall?’

‘Can’t do much there apart from sandbags. If they don’t work and it floods… well, it floods. Least nobody lives there. Not much you can do for the present, vicar. Couple of us will take a look at the river, work out where we can either build up the bank or create a new barrier… and then rely on the expertise of our good friend Parry.’

‘Well, just let me know.’

‘Will do.’

She’d need to be prepared. If anyone was made temporarily homeless, there were spare bedrooms at the vicarage, just need to get more beds from somewhere. And she’d need to get over to Knights Frome and pick up the Boswell. Get across the county without a boat.

‘Mrs Watkins?’

‘Oh, I’m sorry…?’

She turned to find a woman standing next to her under the canopy of furrowed oak.

Fulsome red hair against turquoise Gore-Tex and a metal-framed case. Oh God, not now.

‘My name’s Leonora Winterson.’

‘Oh… yes.’

‘I think you met my husband?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘Well.’ Mrs Winterson gazed down Church Street. ‘This is all looking a bit critical, isn’t it?’

‘Well, not exactly critical yet…’

‘Nothing’s safe any more, Mrs Watkins. Not even a place like this. All these people moving in looking for Olde England, and Olde England’s getting washed away before their eyes. Soon be no more stable than Bangladesh, but I suppose we all have to grab what we can while we can. And I think I…’ Stooke’s wife pushed her hair back from her pale face ‘… need to grab you.’

‘Me?’

Mrs Winterson pushed the strap of her camera bag higher up her shoulder, looking down at the cobbles, like smooth brown stones on the bed of a shallow stream.

‘Is there somewhere private we could go?’

‘Well, I need to be available, in case…’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘What about the church?’ Merrily said.

Mrs Winterson almost laughed.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Why not?’

37 Emperor of Unbelief

The stone effigy wore the high-necked jacket of a puritan, had a sword unsheathed by his side. And that feature every tourist seemed to notice.

‘Who is he?’ Mrs Winterson asked. ‘And why do his eyes appear to be open? That’s not… normal. Is it?’

Her own eyes were grey-green and quick with nervous energy. Merrily stepped down into the chapel.

‘His name’s Thomas Bull. One of the post-feudal lords of the manor who’d have to shell out periodically to stop this church falling down. You probably saw one of his descendants organising things on the square just now.’

‘Oh, the… bossy one. James?’

‘A lot less wealthy than his ancestor. But a better man.’

‘It’s awfully gloomy in here,’ Mrs Winterson said.

‘But it is private.’

The Bull Chapel was one step down from the chancel, behind the organ pipes. It had one leaded window that looked frosty even in summer. ‘And all mod cons.’

Merrily pulled two folding wooden chairs from a stack wedged between the tomb and the chapel wall. She opened them out. ‘Not long after we moved here, someone told me that, when the tomb was sculpted, the eyes — as with most effigies — were shut. But, because of the iniquities he’d perpetrated in his lifetime, Tom Bull was unable to rest. One day, the vicar’s wife walked in, looking for her husband, and the eyes were… as they are now. It was said that particular vicar’s wife never came in here again.’

‘And you… believe that, do you?’

‘Well, no, my guess is that Tom Bull left instructions for the eyes to be left open so he could lie here for all eternity ogling visiting women. How can I help you, Mrs Winterson?’

Merrily sat down and gathered her cape across her knees, all prim and priestly. Mrs Winterson didn’t join her.

‘You’re probably thinking I haven’t chosen a particularly good time for this.’

‘Well, the village is slowly flooding, and I’m sure there must be something I could be doing out there, but…

‘This really is a horrible place.’

Merrily nodded. It was, sometimes. Interesting that the atmosphere, which she’d always felt was distinctly unholy, should get to an atheist.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘we could’ve gone to the vicarage. Only I didn’t want to disturb Jane. She might be in the middle of a ritual to persuade the river god to turn back before the flood water reaches the grave of the high priestess, Lucy Devenish.’

Mrs Winterson stared for a long moment, exhaled a brittle laugh. Then she sat down opposite Merrily, unpopping her jacket.

‘All right. Point taken. I listen to gossip. I like gossip, I’m a journalist, it’s what I do. I’m sorry. I’m guessing you’ve had bad experiences with the media.’

‘Not so far. But then, they usually make a direct approach.’

‘I’m sorry. When I met your daughter, I…’ Mrs Winterson hooked an Ugg-booted foot around the strap of the camera bag, dragging it in front of her chair. ‘What did my husband have to say?’

‘He asked me a lot of questions.’

‘It’s not something you can easily turn off, professional curiosity. Besides, if you’re looking for somewhere to settle, you like to know how the place works. And the people.’

‘Yes, he was asking how I worked.’

‘Look, if we’ve offended you, I’m sorry. Elliot can be…’

A bank of rain washed against the leaded window and Merrily sensed the water rising, the sudden urgency of life and what a waste of energy it was, all this tap-dancing around the truth.

‘Disingenuous?’ she said.

‘What are you saying, Mrs Watkins?’

‘That’s what you call him is it? Elliot?’

‘It’s what I’ve always called him.’

‘You didn’t like Mathew?’

Leonora made a small noise in her throat.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘that’s saved a bit of time.’

The site was isolated by the rain, Cole Hill mired in cloud. Couple of long tents and the two caravans. Puddles turning into pools, where they’d hit clay. And nobody around, thank God, except Gregory, the security guy, standing in the doorway of his caravan. Jack-the-lad in his bomber jacket, leather trousers, Doc Martens. The caravan behind him a big boom-box vibrating to a hip-hop stammer.

‘What a shithole, eh?’ Gregory said.

Jane could only agree. It looked no prettier than a building site. If Eirion thought she’d feel better seeing it like this, he was wrong. No connections were made. It wasn’t hers, wouldn’t be again.

‘Last day for me, anyway,’ Gregory said. ‘I’m out of here tonight.’

‘What, there’s going to be no security over Christmas?’

‘Not me, anyway. I’ll be getting pissed with my mates. Will you miss me?’

Jane said nothing.

‘He’s a bastard, Blore, isn’t he?’

‘No, really?’ Eirion said.

‘This your boyfriend?’

‘Eirion,’ Jane said. ‘Gregory.’

‘Eirion? Wassat, Welsh?’ Gregory stood back, gesturing inside. ‘You guys wanna beer? On the house?’

Jane flashed no at Eirion.

‘Why not?’ Eirion didn’t look at her. ‘Thanks.’

Tight-lipped, Jane followed Gregory. Inside, it was surprisingly respectable, with a bed-settee and a car battery for the yellow and black DeWalt ghetto blaster. Gregory switched off the music, fetched three bottles of Budweiser lager from the kitchen area.

‘They’re all bastards.’ He snapped off the bottle tops, dropped them in a waste bin, handed bottles to Jane and Eirion. ‘The students, too. Think they own the place, wherever they are.’

‘All students?’ Eirion said.

‘We done a few digs for Blore’s outfit. He’s a bastard, like I say, but he’s straight. He’s a straight bastard.’ Gregory laughed. ‘Look, don’t stand around, girl, sit on the bed.’

‘It’ll get all wet.’

‘It’ll dry out. Students’re a pain in the arse. All wannabe celebs… like the professor. They come back wetting themselves laughing yesterday, after you and him…’ Gregory pointed his bottle at Jane. ‘You were a gift, girl, that’s what they were saying. Never do TV with the professor, I coulda told you that.’

Jane took off her parka, sat on the edge of the bed.

‘What was he saying?’

‘Blore? Nothing much, far’s I know. TV — he despises it. He come in here, one night — not this job, one we done down the Forest of Dean — and the TV’s on, and he just switches it off. Never watch it, he says. And I go, what, not even your own show? And he’s like, that’s the last fucking thing I’m gonna watch. Comes in here quite often, stretches himself out on the bed, where you are, and we have a couple of beers.’

Yeah, Jane thought, he’d do that. Hang out with his security guy to get away from people who wanted to show him their bit of Roman pottery.

‘Anybody wants to be on TV, they deserve all they get. Easy meat. We done this one in the Cotswolds last year and Blore’s doing a bit of a recce of the site — jeans, jacket covered with badges. Along comes this old colonel type, cravat, bristly moustache, shooting stick, face like a beetroot.’ Gregory extended his neck, nose in the air, did the gruff and grumpy. ‘Devil’s going on here? Don’t you know there’s going to be an important archaeological dig on this site? You have any idea how much damage is done by you bloody treasure-hunters with your damned metal detectors?’

‘I think I saw this one,’ Eirion said. ‘Blore keeps quiet, playing him along with expressions of dumb insolence. Winding him up, before completely paralysing the poor old boy with a lecture on the history and the potential of the site, with chronological references to every excavation there since about 1936.’

‘And then, as the Colonel’s walking away, he goes…’

‘Didn’t you used to be in Dad’s fucking Army?’ Eirion smiled. ‘I could never figure how the old boy didn’t see the cameraman.’

‘Back of the van,’ Gregory said. ‘Little peephole in the side. They often do it. Then they invite the old guy for a drink, all have a good laugh and he’s more than happy for them to use it. Signs the form, no problem. People will take any shit from TV. That’s what Blore says.’

‘He doesn’t care what he does to people?’ Eirion said.

‘’Cause it ain’t real, mate. It’s TV. Whoosh, gone. And you pick up the money and on to the next one. It ain’t real.’

‘It is for the viewers.’ Jane sat up, both hands around her beer. ‘For some people, he’s the only thing they know about archaeology.’

‘That’s their problem.’

‘He’s right, I suppose.’ Eirion said. ‘TV’s been degraded. Too many channels, it is. Instead of variety, it all goes into a cheap mush. Trench One — you used to think quality, but they all go the same way. People interested in archaeology, that’s just a minority audience. There’s a much bigger one for like…’

‘People getting made to look small,’ Jane said.

‘He don’t do it,’ Gregory said, ‘some other bastard will and he’ll be out on his arse. I could show you half a dozen guys here who’d have his job, no messing, if he starts to go soft. Walk over his corpse.’

‘That’s scary.’ Jane drank some lager. She didn’t really like lager, but she didn’t want to look like a girl. ‘I mean, if—’

‘It’s survival, darlin’.’

‘But if the only way you can get on in archaeology is to, like, become a bastard on TV—’

‘It’s not the only way.’ Gregory grinned. ‘You seen the big caravan over there? Bigger than this, anyway. That’s his. Blore’s.’

‘He sleeps here? I thought he had a room in the Black Swan.’

‘It’s not for sleeping in, my love. King-size folding bed?’ Gregory spread his hands. ‘I got some spare keys, if you wanna look.’

‘Well,’ Eirion said, ‘that would be—’

‘We’d rather not,’ Jane said firmly.

‘Like I say,’ Gregory said, ‘I’ve done security on a few of these gigs now. Shagfest, or what?’

‘Bill Blore… and his students?’

‘Well, not all of them, obviously,’ Gregory said. ‘Not the blokes.’

Out, then. That wasn’t so hard, was it?

Leonora Winterson had relaxed into her seat as if a weight had been lifted from her body. Her turquoise coat was hanging open; underneath she wore a white sweater with a deep neckline, and the tops of her breasts were tanning-salon brown.

‘No way he was going to hide,’ she said.

‘The police actually wanted you to adopt a new identity?’

‘For a while. The traditional book-burning by red-neck morons in the US Bible Belt, that’s part of the package. Islam, however…’

‘The religious are as cringe-makingly predictable as the doctrines they follow.’

‘My God, you’ve read the book?’

‘Dipped into it. There was a Muslim threat?’

‘Wasn’t a fatwa or anything, just mutterings by a couple of crazy imams, but the police and the security services have been very nervy since 7/7. But, you see, he’s a journalist. We don’t hide. And if you can’t stand up for what you believe in, it makes a mockery of the book.’

‘So this is a compromise.’

‘Only because we don’t want people on our back all the time. He’s become a kind of anti-guru, so you get the disciples. Almost worse than the religious bigots, for whom just knowing he’s around is enough to provoke a need to confront him. As if, by not doing it, they’re betraying their faith?’

‘Really no accounting for some of these people,’ Merrily said.

‘Hates being recognised, anyway. Hates the thought of becoming a personality. Hid behind that beard for a while and now people have that rather messianic image of him he’s got rid of it. The weight — that was an exaggeration anyway. People with big beards always look heavier.’

‘So… the Wintersons.’

‘His mother’s maiden name. Now you know.’ Leonora paused. ‘Jane, huh?’

‘Easy to underestimate Jane.’

‘You’re not going to out us, are you?’

‘That would be unchristian.’

Leonora smiled briefly, stood up and walked over to the tomb, making eye contact with Tom Bull.

‘Bizarre. First person in this village I get to talk to without having to watch what I say, and it’s the vicar in the bloody church. A vicar and a dead lech.’

‘Some irony here that escapes me?’

‘I’m from a solid Church family.’

‘Ah.’

‘Went to Church schools, all the bullshit that goes with that. Why are you nodding?’

‘Your reaction to being in here was… somehow, not the reaction of a lifelong atheist.’

‘Do not…’ Lensi levelled a finger ‘… get too clever.’

Merrily smiled.

‘My father worked for the diocese, in an administrative role. My mother was a Sunday School teacher. Not many of those left, even then. Village in Buckinghamshire, not so unlike this one. My old man became increasingly, insufferably devout. Anglo-Catholic. Hounding the local vicar into installing a statue of the Virgin. Then finally, in middle age, he was ordained himself, and it all became seriously stifling. I used to walk around our church, as an adolescent, muttering obscenities, just for the thrill of the guilt, the almost erotic joy of blasphemy.’

‘You’re trying to shock me?’

‘Hell, no.’ In the ice-white light, Leonora’s skin looked thin, almost translucent. ‘I’ve met a lot of priests. They don’t shock. They simply become lofty and disapproving.’

‘But you were trying to shock your parents.’

‘You wouldn’t believe how many honourable God-fearing, High Church public-school boys were around, even fifteen years ago, and I must’ve been introduced to every one of the genuflecting tossers. Which is why I threw myself at Elliot. Good-looking, ten years older than me. Worldly, married, and a bloody atheist. My God.’

‘When was this?’

‘When I was still at university. London. He was a reporter with the Guardian then. I was always attracted to the media, but I didn’t particularly want to start off on some provincial rag, so I used to hang around their pubs. He was married but I made myself… you know, hard to resist. Don’t ask.’

‘You threw yourself at a religious-affairs correspondent?’

‘Well, he wasn’t, then. Just a general news reporter. That came later, when their religious-affairs guy was off sick and they asked Elliot to stand in. Guardian reporters get a fair bit of leeway on how they handle a story, and Elliot… well, you can imagine. Good writer, very funny… and Guardian readers are liberal, and liberals tend to be atheist…’

‘Not invariably.’

‘Well, a higher proportion of them are. You must know that’s true. Anyway, shortly after that, he was poached by the Independent.’

‘And of course the Independent doesn’t exactly do religion, does it? Or at least not from the normal perspective.’

‘If the Indy was going to have a religious-affairs correspondent it had to be an atheist, yeah.’

‘I can see the logic.’

‘Still a while before people started to get the joke. And even then, it’s not the biggest-selling paper on the rack. It was quite funny — my parents, when they found out what he did, they actually thought I was coming to my senses at last.’

‘When did they find out?’

‘About the same time as the Archbishop of Canterbury’s office, I’d guess. Filtered down, and then the doors started closing. The religious establishments build high walls very quickly. Centuries of practice. By the time it was common knowledge where he was coming from, the damage was done, they’d all been on the end of Elliot’s harpoon. Unfortunately, by that time my father was too old for it to be much fun any more. I never actually threw it in their faces — hey, I’m marrying the Emperor of Unbelief, suck on that — but we… haven’t spoken for some time. Not since the book appeared, anyway.’

‘The book, I suppose, being inevitable.’

‘It was — looking back — very much the only way to go. An aggressively atheist religious-affairs correspondent was always going to have a limited lifespan.’

Merrily said nothing for a while, beginning, at last, to see where the Stookes were coming from.

The Emperor of Unbelief. The awful banality of it flagged up against the flaky, fake piety of the Bull Chapel.

38 Wounded Bird

Outside, Eirion, naturally, had to ask.

‘So did he…?’

‘No!’

‘No, I wasn’t suggesting he actually — I mean, he never even made, like… an overture?’

‘He’s an archaeologist, not a bloody composer. And two days ago I’d never even met him.’

The rain was mist-thin, clinging to Jane’s face like cold sweat as they walked away from Gregory’s caravan through coils of chilled mud they couldn’t avoid.

‘I suppose if he…’ Eirion took Jane’s cold hand. ‘I suppose he’d leave you alone if he had you lined up from the start as a sacrifice to the god of TV ratings. I mean, personally, I cannot imagine anyone who would not want to—’

‘What is this? Let’s stop Jane from slashing her wrists before Christmas? Look, it’s clear that, if you’re a woman, with Blore you’re going to get stuffed one way or the other.’

Jane looked back at the excavation. Somewhere a bird was chirping, but Coleman’s Meadow was unrecognisable as the place where, on a golden morning in high summer, Eirion had photographed her cupping the sun.

‘It’s dead, Irene.’

‘Just the way it looks now, work in progress.’

‘No, something’s gone. I don’t want to remember it like this.’ Jane zipped her parka. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

‘I can’t get anything right today, can I?’ Eirion said.

‘It’s not you, it—’

Down on the edge of meadow a car door slammed.

Someone called out through the murk.

‘Jane!’

Neil Cooper was waiting for them down near the wicket gate, where his car and a white van, probably Gregory’s, were parked. The ghost of Cole Hill was embossed on the clouds like a pale bell on a minimalist wedding card.

‘I’m sorry, Jane — about what happened, I really am. I wasn’t able to say much yesterday, and I didn’t like to phone you at home.’

He looked older. He hadn’t shaved. He wore a patched camouflage jacket and a woolly hat. He was drenched, his jeans dark with damp, like he’d been walking through high undergrowth.

‘Not as if you didn’t warn me, Coops,’ Jane said.

‘For what it’s worth, if somebody’d warned me, I wouldn’t’ve taken any notice either. Is this…?’

‘Eirion Lewis,’ Eirion said.

He put out his hand. Coops nodded, shook it limply. Jane thinking the way he was looking today, Eirion would have no reason at all to feel threatened. Pity about that.

‘You didn’t come here on a wet Sunday to look for me,’ she said.

‘Weather’s lousy, half the county’s under water, and Blore’s in the pub. I just wanted to…’

He was worried about something. Possibly even upset, and it wasn’t about what had happened to her. She had a sense of parting, the end of something for him, too, and she shivered in the damp, airless drabness of everything.

‘Main reason,’ Coops said, ‘is we’ve arranged to go away for Christmas, to my wife’s parents in Somerset.’ He gestured with his head towards the meadow. ‘Blore’ll be carrying on, with a skeleton crew. He doesn’t seem to observe Christmas. This is the last chance I’ll get this year to try and see what’s going on.’

‘But you’re in charge, aren’t you? You’re the county guy… the employer.’

‘That’s no longer the way it operates, Jane.’

Coops gave Eirion a sideways look.

‘Forget everything you’ve heard about the Welsh,’ Jane said. ‘He’s absolutely to be relied on.’

‘I can die happy now, I can,’ Eirion said. ‘I am no longer a symbol of the ludicrous English preconceptions about my race.’

Coops smiled faintly, then looked away across the site towards the grey swelling that was all that remained of Cole Hill. He bit his upper lip.

‘As the Council — or rather the Council Cabinet — are into farming out as much as possible to the private sector, the truth is that half the time we’re not quite sure who we’re supposed to be working for.’

‘The council-tax payers? The people?’

‘Don’t make me laugh. Decisions get made over your head, you don’t even know who’s made them or why. I… probably need to get out of this area next year, get a job somewhere else.’ He pulled off his hat, wiped his face on the lining. ‘You going away for Christmas?’

‘Coops, my mother’s the vicar. This is the time of year when they do big box-office? So if there’s anything you need me to do…’

He shook his head.

‘Hey, it’s not as if I’ve got anything to lose. I’ll be looking for a new… career path or something, in the New Year.’

‘No! Jane, listen to me, this is was what I was afraid of. You must not let that bastard ruin your life, do you understand? This job needs people like you.’

‘Loonies?’

‘People who care. People who… love everything here that’s ancient and mysterious, even if it isn’t spectacular… even if it isn’t visible. In fact, there’s a report coming out from English Heritage next year that will suggest that, the way we’re going, less than ten per cent of the ancient monuments we can see now will be visible for future generations. No decent money available for conservation, developers ripping up the countryside. We need people who can get angry about that.’

‘Blore gets angry.’

‘He also gets rich. Easy enough to get angry over lost causes like the Serpent.’ Coops wiped his forehead again with his hat, put it back on. ‘I’m probably a bit overwrought, Jane. Couldn’t sleep last night, which is not like me.’

‘Coops, could you just, like, spit this out?’

‘Not that easy. I don’t really know what I’m getting at.’ He walked away, up the path towards the orchard, as if the site might be bugged. ‘OK… I don’t have many friends in the Chief Executive’s department. In fact just the one, and no more than a lowly secretary to an assistant, but she… happened to be in the right place at the right time to notice that someone in that department had received a report. About this dig.’

‘From who?’ Eirion said.

‘Not from us, that’s the point.’

‘From Blore?’

‘It’s a report which, in the normal way of things, might have been expected to go to my boss.’

Eirion said, ‘Blore is reporting directly to the Chief Executive of the Council? About Coleman’s Meadow?’

‘Blore was very proprietorial about this excavation from the start. Did all the geophysics personally, with ground radar, and he was working here before any of us even knew he had the contract.’

‘And what does that suggest?’ Eirion said.

‘Well, obviously, it’s a prestigious excavation. And it’s exciting. We don’t often find unknown standing stones, and whatever happens it’ll make for some fantastic television. Now, it might only be that, or it might be… he’s found something we didn’t expect.’

‘Like what?’ Jane said.

‘Well, I don’t know, do I? Whatever it is he’s — Obvious he’ll want to keep it to himself, especially if it could provide an eye-popping climax to his programme. If he has got something, he’ll let it out no more than a week before the programme goes out, for maximum publicity.’

‘Yes.’ Eirion nodded. ‘That’s how it’s done.’

‘What could it be, Coops?’

‘I’m not sure. At the end of the day, he might be a shit but he’s a bloody good archaeologist. I’ve just spent a couple of hours walking round the place, trying to second-guess him, but he covers his tracks. He had one stone more or less unearthed, the whole thing, but now the soil’s gone back, or most of it. As if there’s something he doesn’t want anyone else to see.’

‘Couldn’t that just be because of the danger of flood damage?’ Eirion said.

‘Sure, but…’

‘What can we do?’ Jane said.

‘Nothing.’

‘No, I mean, what can we do — me and Eirion? We’ve really got nothing to lose, Coops. We can watch him. We can watch what he does, where he goes.’

‘No. I don’t want you going near him, Jane. I’m serious. He’s done enough to you already, but if he really takes offence he can script his programme in a way that will make you look even worse.’

‘We don’t have to make it obvious. What are we looking for?’

‘God… I don’t know.’ Coops ran a hand over the stubble on his jaw. ‘Anything unexpected. Say, for instance, if he suddenly starts to extend the site. In any direction.’

‘What would that mean?’

‘Well, it… it could mean, obviously, that there’s more here than we thought. Originally, as you know, we were thinking in terms of a shortish stone-row, like Harold’s Stones at Trelleck. The original geophys suggested three stones, possibly a fourth, fairly randomly arranged, no identifiable pattern and not too far under the surface. But Blore’s done his own survey and, although I haven’t seen the results, I wouldn’t rule out something more extensive.’

‘A stone circle?’

‘Too early to speculate with any authority.’

‘But this excavation,’ Jane said. ‘You’re saying this could be just the beginning of something huge. I mean, like the Serpent? As important as that?’

‘Please, Jane…’ Coops wiped some dampness from his forehead with his sleeve. ‘I wish I’d never…’

‘I won’t go near him. I’ll be very careful.’

Eirion said, ‘Jane, I don’t think—’

‘We’ll be very careful. Coops, do you have a number where I can contact you? I know you’ll be back after Christmas and everything, and Blore’s not going to have that much—?’

‘No,’ Coops said. ‘You don’t understand, I won’t be here after Christmas. Not officially, anyway. We’ve been told to stay out of it. Get on with other things. Leave it to Blore.’

He looked gutted.

‘So whatever he finds,’ Jane said, ‘he gets all the credit?’

‘That’s… yes. He gets the credit. And the money. Look… you’ve got my mobile number. I’ll keep it charged. Just don’t get carried away. I could be totally wrong. I don’t want to look like a complete idiot. I’m a professional, not a visionary.’

‘Yeah, well,’ Jane said, ‘it looks like I’ll never be a professional, but nobody can stop me being the other thing.’

She felt her smile go crooked. She felt a small release, her soul stirring like a wounded bird among the dead leaves.

It had started to rain.

It had probably never stopped.

39 Martyr

‘What can I say?’ Merrily said. ‘He seemed a nice man. I confess I didn’t expect that.’

The rain fizzed in the chapel window. Leonora Stooke looked amused.

‘An atheist can’t be a nice man?’

‘His book is aggressive, disdainful, derisive…’

‘And funny?’

‘Occasionally.’

‘He’s a good writer,’ Leonora said. ‘A good writer can write anything. You understand that, don’t you?’

‘I think the one word we’re walking all around here,’ Merrily said, ‘is hack. He did it for the money and the need to cash in on his brief notoriety. Recycle all the dirt he’d gathered, plus a few scurrilous anecdotes he might not have been able to use in the paper. Put it all together, cement with vitriol. Get it out before his star vanished from the… journalistic firmament.’

The Hole in the Sky.

‘You feel better now?’ Leonora said.

She was playing absently with Tom Bull’s fingers. The poor old sod must be squirming in sexual anguish.

‘Yeah. I do, actually.’

Merrily felt angry at Stooke, angry at the Lord of the Light website. Above all, angry at herself, and yet…

‘All books are written for money,’ Leonora said. ‘Quite an auction for this one. More populist than Dawkins, more outrageous and no screeds of tedious Darwin-idolatry — I’m quoting one of the reviews. It was still a gamble, though. He needed to quit the paper first. Outside of daily journalism, he could drop any pretence of editorial balance.’

‘I see.’

‘And I have to tell you, Merrily, he is so tired of it now. Doesn’t want to write another word about religion, one way or the other. Out of his system. Only you don’t get away that easily. The publishers want another, and there’s a frightening pile of money on the table.’

‘But the cupboard’s bare, right? No more interviews with archbishops and cardinals. No more Dalai Lama.’

‘There’s the diary of the period post-Hole. All the lunacy it spawned.’

‘My life as the Devil’s spin doctor?’

Leonora sighed.

‘He even thought of joining one of these fundamentalist sects, dissect it from the inside. Not as if they’d recognise him. But it would just be too tedious. And they always turn out to be far less sinister than their websites, don’t they? Sad, inadequate little people in search of some kind of imaginary — look, you know the truth about that 666 thing? He didn’t change the spelling of his first name. His father simply registered his birth in a hurry and didn’t realise there were supposed to be two Ts in Matthew. And then they rather liked it. It’s that simple.’

‘This is the most disappointing day of my life, Leonora. Most people in my profession would give up two years’ stipend to come face to face with the man who handles the Antichrist’s publicity.’

‘I’m very sorry.’

‘Still needs new material, though, doesn’t he? Might even have to fall back on the story of how he wound up in a crazy village with a priest who doubles as diocesan exorcist while her daughter follows ley lines and worships old gods.’

A silence.

‘Don’t tell me we weren’t earmarked for Chapter 14, Leonora. He was questioning me far too thoroughly.’

‘It’s the way he is. He collects people. Can’t resist it. Professional curiosity.’

‘And then there was you and my daughter. At Lucy’s grave. Oh, what sort of pagan are you, Jane?’

Leonora racked up a smile that was rueful but perhaps not rueful enough.

‘You’re quite a nice story, you and Jane.’

‘It’s been done.’

‘Only skirted around — I’ve seen the cuttings. Look, Merrily, you may be right, Elliot will have you in his scrapbook, you and Jane — awfully photogenic, the pair of you. He’s an opportunist, seldom wastes anything.’

‘Well, thank you for putting my mind at rest.’

‘But he isn’t going to repay a favour by shafting you.’

Merrily leaned back, listening to the rain hissing and crackling like a fat-frier in a chip shop.

‘A favour.’

‘Yes.’

‘I was beginning to think we’d never get here.’

‘We have a problem,’ Leonora said. ‘Essentially, you’re not the only one who knows we’re in the village.’

‘Oh.’

‘It’s stupid, but it’s causing us a lot of tension. The ravings of anonymous fundamentalist zealots, as I say, part of the package, all grist to the publicity mill, but this is too close.’

‘And, erm… why are you telling me?’

‘Because it’s a member of your church.’

‘Am I allowed to ask?’

Leonora leaned back against Tom Bull, so that she was almost sitting on his face. Maybe the significance escaped her, probably it didn’t.

‘It’s the postmistress.’

‘Oh.’

‘Arguably the worst of all possible scenarios.’

‘Mmm. You have got a problem, haven’t you?’

The day was growing dim. Wrapped in her sodden cape, Merrily stood on the edge of the square and watched reflections of the yellow lights in ancient houses trembling in the flood. No curtains were drawn. If it was coming for them, the residents wanted to know.

And she couldn’t lose the feeling, as James Bull-Davies loped through the lashing rain, that the village had changed for ever, lost its nerve, its confident sheen. The old timbered buildings seemed to be leaning closer together, as nightfall turned black and white into grey and white and the dismal rain kept on, and there were no lights in Lucy’s old house.

‘James, have you seen Lol?’

‘Last I saw of him, out working with Parry.’ James followed her into the shelter of the market hall. They stood by an oak pillar, looking towards the water. ‘Ken Williams, who owns that strip west of the village hall, agreed for Parry to go on his land with the digger, build up the bank. Might save the bottom end of the riverside estate.’

‘Save it? You mean—?’

‘Well, not yet. Water’s a foot deep in some gardens, though. So probably only a matter of time.’

The impact of the continuing rain made the bottom of Church Street look like a choppy sea.

‘So if it keeps on raining…?’

James leaned forward, hands linked behind his back, his face long.

‘Then we’re probably looking at evacuation.’

Merrily looked up in alarm from under the rain-heavy hood of her cape.

‘Do people know that?’

‘Tentatively suggested to a few families on the estate that they should think about moving valued items of furniture upstairs. Naturally, they’re resistant to the idea. As if Christmas confers some sort of immunity, as if nature can’t wreak havoc because it’s Christmas. Gord! Like the blessed river’s going to wait till they’ve finished stuffing their faces.’

‘What can I do? We have spare bedrooms at the vicarage.’

‘Hell, Merrily, don’t go broadcasting that. We’ll be suggesting people find relatives they can stay with, outside the village.’

‘Leave the village?’

‘Don’t like saying it, and some of them don’t like hearing it from the likes of me, but what’s the alternative? Council’s got problems all over the county, some worse than this. Question of priorities. Planning bods’re going to get some stick when this is over about allowing new housing on the flood plain, but that’s happening everywhere.’

‘But what can we do now? What can I do?’

‘Do? Do nothing. Save your accommodation for emergencies, any people left homeless in the night. Meanwhile, go about life as normal, hope the rain stops, level goes down.’

‘And pray.’

‘Only try not to do it in the street.’ James puffed out his lips. ‘Be expedient to lock that bloody woman in a cellar somewhere until all this is over.’

‘Shirley West?’

Not a subject she’d raised with anyone before, but it was probably necessary now.

‘Much wailing and wringing of hands whenever she can find an audience. Beginning of the end, sort of thing. Great flood come to wash away our sins. Or more specifically, Merrily, your sins. Not the best time, I’d have to say, to have unleashed that particular sermon.’

‘It needed saying, James.’

‘No, it didn’t.’ James shaking his head as if in pain. ‘Nobody cares, Merrily. Nobody gives a fig about the spirituality or otherwise of whichever bloody savages erected the damn stones in Coleman’s Meadow. Nobody apart from you… and her. Truth is, possibly because of your other… hat, you’re dwelling on issues beyond normal people’s need-to-know. I’m sorry, but that’s how it looked to me.’

‘Oh.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘No. No, you’re right. I overreacted. It’s ridiculous. One woman out of a whole village. But she does worry me. Couple of months ago never out of church, full of this slightly suspect humility, but humility none the less, and now…’

‘Hmph.’

‘What?’

‘Ah.’ James shuffled his feet on the cobbles. ‘Alison was in Leominster yesterday. Found the place littered with flyers for this Church of the Holy Light?’

‘Church of the Lord of the Light. Shirley’s other church.’

‘That’s the crew. Born-again johnnies. Gather in a former warehouse on the industrial estate. Odd set of buggers. Members forbidden to use the health food shop. Beyond me. However, something you should know, if you don’t already… seems to be an offshoot of that revivalist thing that mushroomed in the Radnor Valley, couple of years ago.’

‘Ellis?’ Merrily spun away from the oak pillar, her hood falling away. ‘Nick Ellis is back?’

‘Gord, no. Calm down. I said an offshoot. Can’t see that fellow showing his face around here again, ever. Well, actually, you can… there are pictures of him in his white robes plastered all over the town.’

‘I’ve not been in Leominster for a couple of weeks. God, James…’

Father Ellis. The hysteria, the speaking-in-tongues, the internal ministry for women possessed by the demon of lust. All the charges that ought to have been hung on Ellis, including sexual assault, criminal damage, and he’d got away with it.

‘Lord of the Light — he was part of a charismatic Anglican fringe movement called Sea of Light. Became too extreme for them. Last I heard he was in America.’

Merrily felt damp inside, with apprehension. Remembered there’d been a lot of rain when Ellis was dominating his congregation in the hill village of Old Hindwell.

‘I was fully prepared to testify, James, but nobody else was willing to, and the Crown Prosecution Service threw it out. As they do.’

‘Well… something of a martyr now, apparently. Hounded out of his own country.’

‘A martyr? The bastard got off without a… wasn’t even charged. And this is after I actually made a statement saying I’d seen him insert a crucifix into—’

‘Yes, quite.’ James backed off, palms raised. ‘All I’m saying, if there are lunatics going around claiming Ellis was falsely accused, pointing fingers in your direction, might well explain the change in West’s attitude towards you.’

‘Might, yes. Thank you.’

The last explanation of Shirley West had come from Siân Callaghan-Clarke, standing in while Merrily was away for a few days. Siân discovering that Shirley had become committed to a rigid form of self-cleansing after learning that her husband — now ex — had been a distant cousin of the Herefordshire-born mass-murderer Fred West. Hanging on to the name, in penance.

‘James, if they’re in contact with Ellis himself…?’

‘Internet.’

‘Mmm. Makes it all too easy.’

‘Especially if the chap wants to keep the lid on his whereabouts.’ James sniffed. ‘Never liked fanatics who set up churches in sheds. Seen soldiers turn from perfectly serviceable fighting chaps to Bible-punching lunatics after one week’s leave.’

Merrily fell silent, thinking of the website, Thelordofthelight.com. How she’d said to Lol, in all innocence, Maybe coming in from America.

‘Watch your back, vicar, that’s all I’m saying. This climate-change business… sometimes think even people’s brains are getting overheated. Avoid her. Anyway, need to be orf. Rain’s not going to stop anytime soon.’

‘Avoiding her could be… a bit difficult.’ Merrily slipped between the oak pillars, pulling her hood back up. ‘Better make a run for it.’

40 Moral Void

Back in the vicarage, Merrily went directly through to the scullery, hanging her soaking cape behind the door and sitting down at the desk in front of the black Bakelite phone. She took a breath, let it out slowly, then dialled Huw Owen’s number in the Brecon Beacons.

Engaged. She’d wait. This was potentially political. Not a good idea to take it any further without advice from her spiritual director.

She made some tea, picked up The Hole in the Sky. Opened the cover, held it up to the window and peered through the hole. All the way to hell?

It made a lot more sense now. Merrily started on page one, twenty minutes of fast-flipping taking her through the entire book.

‘God’ telling the Yorkshire Ripper to kill fallen women and advising George W. Bush to take Iraq. The Spanish Inquisition, the sectarian horrors in Northern Ireland, all the bloodied roads to 9/11.

Nothing new — how could there be? Not even Stooke’s delight in old-fashioned blasphemy. Giving God a good kicking with steel toecaps, trampling on taboos. The Christian God and Jesus Christ, as was the custom in this country, getting a bigger kicking than Allah and The Prophet Mo, as Stooke called him with something close to a condescending affection. Apart from the recycled interviews with unsuspecting religious leaders — Rowan Williams was a good one — there was little here not already covered by Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, a more distinguished hack than Stooke.

The relishing of blasphemy… when you thought about it, that seemed more characteristic of Leonora than Stooke himself who seemed to have no personal axe to grind against the Church.

She turned to the final chapter.

Merrily dialled Huw’s number again. This time it was the machine. Well, it was Sunday and he had a bunch of isolated churches.

‘I’m not in. If it’s owt important you’d best leave a message.’

‘Huw, it’s me,’ Merrily said. ‘I have a problem.’

She put the phone down and before she could take her hand away, it rang.

‘Gorra favour to ask, Merrily.’

‘Frannie. A favour. That’s not like you.’

‘Ho ho. Listen, that nursing sister at the hospital, your mate, what was her name? Belfast woman, indiscreet.’

‘I’d be more inclined to see her as a woman of conscience with a fairly flexible loyalty to the Hereford health authority. Eileen Cullen.’

‘Could you get her to find out something for me? Nothing contentious. Just I don’t want to be connected with it.’

‘But it’s OK if I’m connected with it?’

‘Nothing contentious, Merrily.’

‘Your drug thing pan out?’

‘Better than expected, as it happens. Yes, indeed. I just need a bit of information that your friend should be able to provide very quickly.’

‘You’re not going to tell me, are you?’

Silence.

‘All right, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll try and get hold of Eileen Cullen, explain what an essentially decent person you are, underneath, and give her your number. That way you can tell her what you want and she can decide if it agrees with her conscience’

Bliss thought about it. Merrily could hear traffic noise.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Do that. Give her the mobile. If I don’t hear from her in an hour, I’ll call you back.’

‘It’s that urgent?’

‘My whole life is urgent, Merrily.’

‘Where are you?’

‘In the car. The car’s me office now. A privacy issue.’

‘Are you all right?’

‘Yeh, I’m rediscovering me faith.’

In the pause, she heard an angry car horn.

‘When I was a little lad,’ Bliss said, ‘I had a hard time separating God from Santa Claus. Our priest, Father Flanagan, used to come round on Friday nights with his bets for me dad to put on for him. And this particular Friday — I was a cocky little twat — I said, Father. I’ve decided I’ll not be coming to church on Sunday, and he goes, Why is that, Francis? And I say, Because I’ve just turned nine, Father, and I’m too old to believe in God. And Father Flanagan’s creased up laughing. One day, Francis, he says, when you least expect it, you’ll look up, and there above you you’ll see what is unmistakably His face. And when that happens… when that happens… you’ll remember this moment.’

‘And you were suitably chastened?’

‘No, it was a bit of an anticlimax. I thought he was gonna tell me something interesting.’

‘Are you drunk?’

‘I don’t drink.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Anyway,’ Bliss said, ‘I looked up, and it wasn’t the big feller, it was a face called Steve Furneaux. But I finally saw what Father Flanagan was on about. There is a God.’

‘And is he on your side?’

‘I frigging hope so, Merrily, because no other bastard is.’

A few minutes later Jane and Eirion came back and Merrily cobbled together a seriously late lunch of cheese omelettes and hot mince pies — not good enough, but nobody seemed hungry, the combination of darkness and flood making Ledwardine seem, for the first time, like a perilous place to be. And she kept thinking of Father Ellis and the dark brew of piety and perversity that had poisoned a valley.

Jane was more animated now, but in an agitated way. Her eyes flickering as she ate. There was a thin streak of red mud down her face that looked disturbingly like a knife wound.

They listened to the flood update on Radio H & W. Roads all over the county were being closed, even major roads, east — west routes particularly affected. Merrily had to collect a guitar and was apprehensive. There were few places in the county further east than Knights Frome.

‘We’ll come,’ Jane said. ‘Eirion would love to see Al Boswell’s workshop, wouldn’t you, Irene?’

‘I would, Jane, but I told Lol we’d go round to his place tonight, see what he wants us to do for this back-projection at his concert. And the recordings?’

‘I’d forgotten. Mum, listen, it’s not safe out there. Can’t you like go tomorrow?’

‘Christmas Eve? Not a chance.’

‘Or we’ll go tomorrow.’

‘No, I need to try. If it looks bad I’ll turn back.’

‘It’s just that if I’m going to be an orphan, I’d prefer it didn’t happen at Christmas. That would be just so Dickens. Do I have time for a quick shower? I feel…’ Jane flapped her arms ‘… yucky.’

‘If there’s enough hot water.’

When she’d gone up, Merrily drew the curtains, and then — superstitiously — drew them back.

‘How is she, Eirion? Really?’

‘We, er… we went to Coleman’s Meadow. I persuaded her it was the thing to do.’

‘Good.’

‘Good and… not so good. We met Neil Cooper — the archaeologist from the council? Not a happy man.’

Eirion didn’t look too happy either. Since she’d seen him last, he seemed to have grown up, lost the puppy fat, turned the big corner. She listened to his story about Bill Blore’s private memos to the Council — the authority he’d publicly slagged off. It didn’t actually strike her as all that curious.

‘Maybe it’s part of his contract for the excavation. The Council don’t trust Blore, and they got into a potentially difficult situation with the Dinedor Serpent, so everything he finds, every step he takes, he has to report back.’

‘And he’d’ve agreed to that?’

‘What choice would he have? And anyway, in my experience, the high-profile maverick image is usually a façade. You often find that so-called rebels, when you meet them, tend to be disappointingly orthodox.’

Merrily was thinking of Mathew Stooke. Eirion sighed.

‘The older I get, Mrs Watkins, the more disillusioned I become. By the time I’m thirty, the world’s going to look like a grey waste-land full of zombies who believe in nothing. In fact, I can see it already. All these teenage suicides, is that any wonder?’

‘Hey, come on, Eirion, this is how Jane talks when she’s down. I rely on you to lift her out of it.’

‘Sorry.’

Eirion pushed back his chair, went over to the window. It was like looking into an aquarium with no lights.

‘It doesn’t end,’ he said. ‘She’s become obsessed now with finding whatever Blore’s discovered. What it’s done to Cooper, that’s made her angry, but also… hopeful, you know? That there’s still some mystery to be uncovered there? And she thinks if she can let it out before Blore does it might somehow clear her name, turn it all around. She… doesn’t give up.’

‘You noticed.’

‘Dragging me all round the boundaries of the site and halfway up Cole Hill, trying to make out the alignment through the rain, trying to see something new. It was… seemed a bit pointless. Sad.’

‘You know what we need to do?’ Merrily said, as the phone started ringing in the scullery. ‘Somehow we need to persuade Blore either to ditch the interview with Jane or record it again, rather more kindly.’

‘How do you propose to do that?’

‘Haven’t the faintest idea, Eirion.’

Huw’s Yorkshire voice, flat and scuffed as an old rag rug, sometimes reassuring, not always.

‘Never seemed like much to me, Stooke. Doesn’t claim to be a boffin, doesn’t refer constantly to Darwinian theory. Doesn’t seem to specialise in owt.’

‘Except derision,’ Merrily said. ‘He specialises in scorn.’

‘A man of the age,’ Huw said.

There was a pause. Merrily thought she could hear the ubiquitous rain bombarding Huw’s gaunt rectory in the Brecon Beacons, the crackle of his log fire.

‘So Stooke’s missus wants you to get this West woman off their backs.’

‘Essentially, yes.’

‘You told them she’s not a member of your church.’

‘But she is. She comes every week. But she goes to the other place twice a week.’

‘A serial worshipper.’

‘She’s quite clever about it. Never really mentions the Church of the Lord of the Light in Ledwardine. No posters in the post office. A devout Anglican of the old school. My church is her church.’

‘But she slags you off. She walked out of your service.’

‘She would see that as defending the village’s religious tradition against a dangerous subversive influence.’

‘Kind of support she got?’

‘Not a lot. Some people think she’s a joke, some feel sorry for her because she’s a lone voice. And, of course, her opposition to the raising of the heathen stones makes her a gift to Lyndon Pierce and the pro-expansion lobby.’

Impregnable, in a way, when you thought about it. Exactly the way she looked behind the big metal cross and the reinforced glass in the post office.

‘All right,’ Huw said. ‘I’m looking at this website, as we speak. Thelordofthelight.com. You think this is Ellis again, from the States?’

‘I honestly don’t know, Huw. It carries his mark. It’s not unintelligent, and it’s plausible enough. And it would explain Shirley’s attitude. Ellis has very good reason to hate me.’

‘It has been predicted that, close to the Endtime, Satan will incarnate’, Huw quoted. ‘He will have neither horns nor tail.’

‘That’s cows in the clear, then.’

Huw laughed.

‘You read the rest, though,’ Merrily said, ‘what it’s almost saying is that Satan is the secular society. The moral void.’

‘A persuasive argument in many ways. Where do you stand?’

‘Personally, I don’t have that much of a problem with unbelievers, unless they try to bully other people into unbelief. But then, I have the same problem with people who try to bully people into belief. Like Ellis.’

‘Can’t bully an atheist into faith any more.’

‘But you can make their lives unpleasant. The Stookes are getting what I suppose you’d call ominous mail and anonymous letters, arguably from the same source, basically reminding them of the various names of their… satanic master.’

‘If Stooke looks different and they’re living under a false name,’ Huw said, ‘how did Shirley find out about them?’

‘She’s the postmistress. They haven’t completely changed their identity — he won’t do that. So his real name still appears on official documents… and on cheques. Silly mistake by Leonora. They were late paying an electricity bill because they were contesting it, and in the end she took the final demand to pay it at the post office… paid with a cheque, with, of course, the name Stooke on it. Not realising at the time what kind of woman was handling the transaction.’

‘Shirley must’ve seen that as a little gift from God.’

‘Oh yes. Leonora remembers her looking up with this awful still smile she has — pious going on sinister. Thank you, she says, handing over the receipt, Mrs Stooke.’

‘So how did it go from there?’

‘Quite subtly, for Shirley. Or maybe she was being restrained. Say she told someone at the Lord of the Light, and they passed the information up the line to Ellis or whoever — if not Ellis there has to be somebody like him — and the word comes back to play it quietly. Not to out him, because then he becomes public property… a target for fundamentalists everywhere.’

‘Aye, and they wouldn’t have him to themselves any more. Their private demon for the Endgame. Think they’re the chosen ones.’

‘Hard to credit the mentality.’

‘It’s all too bloody easy. These folk are fantasists of the first order. Owt unexpected happens, it’s the hand of God. That’s all they’ve done so far, is it, threatening letters?’

‘Well… seems Shirley quite often takes an evening stroll from the orchard to Coleman’s Meadow. Taking a good look at Cole Barn from the public footpath. They see her holding out her arms, apparently calling on God to… who knows? Ties in with what she said at the parish meeting last week — a deep evil in Coleman’s Meadow and evil returns to it.’

‘Still just one woman, Merrily.’

‘Maybe not. They look out of the window around nightfall and quite often there’s a man there, at the top of the field, watching the house. And considering how comparatively remote that place is…’

‘Shirley living with anybody?’

‘Don’t know. But it’s only ten minutes to Leominster. Probably some members of the church living even closer than that. When I say watching the house, I don’t mean furtively creeping from tree to tree, which would be worrying — I mean standing there in the open, not moving.’

‘I’m wondering why she came to you if they’ve got a Special Branch man on the end of a phone.’

‘That occurred to me, too. She said — as she’d said earlier — that Stooke refuses to be intimidated by religious cranks. And doesn’t trust the security services, which I’d guess is normal enough left-wing journalistic paranoia. And, anyway, what could he do? She’s not a terrorist. Basically… I think Leonora just wants to know if Shirley’s mental. I said there was no record of her ever harming anyone. I could’ve said more but Shirley, strictly speaking, is a member of my, erm, flock and the Stookes, well…’

‘All right,’ Huw said. ‘I’m going to sit on t’fence here, lass. I’d say talk to them both, but don’t get too involved. If Ellis is out there in spiritual cyberspace, he won’t just have the Stookes in his cross-hairs.’

‘Me?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Sorry… I was just thinking about something Leonora said. I may have to talk to them again, before I talk to Shirley. Which probably means tonight.’

This could be a long night.

‘All right,’ Huw said. ‘You’ve consulted me. I’m noting this in my diary on the evening of the 23rd of December at 4.44 p.m. precisely. Consider your compact little bum formally covered.’

41 Dark Ones

The heat was like urban heat. Penthouse-apartment heat. Or like when you walked into one of those department stores with powerful blow-heaters over the doors, and it made you feel almost faint.

‘Coffee?’ Stooke said.

‘Oh… please.’

Aware of a small tremor under her voice. Nerves, for heaven’s sake. Merrily hadn’t expected nerves.

She walked ahead of him towards a stone fireplace, floor to ceiling, with a cast-iron wood-burning stove, logs stacked in stone recesses either side, the room so bright she was blinking.

So what had she expected — coldness, absence of light, a sense of void?

Certainly not nerves. She hadn’t expected nerves. Perhaps she should have prayed for strength before leaving the car.

Perhaps she was pathetic.

‘Lenni’s washing her hair. Gets rather messed up in this weather. She’ll be down in a few minutes.’

‘I’m sorry, I tried to phone, but you’re—’

‘Ex-directory. Of course. She should’ve given you the number. Probably just slipped her mind. Things do. Not a problem. We weren’t going anywhere.’

Stooke took Merrily’s dripping Barbour and extended an arm towards a long cream-leather sofa. She sat at the end furthest from the stove, its glass doors shimmering a fierce furnace red, which still wouldn’t account for the temperature in a room this size.

All the lights were on. Circular halogen lights, like little bright planets, sunk into the plasterboard between new oak beams. Bracketed spotlights on the walls, all fully lit. No dark corners, no secrets, no mystery. Maybe a message here for the religious. Mystery wastes everyone’s time, Stooke had said in Coleman’s Meadow.

‘I’m afraid it’s rather too damn warm in here at the moment,’ he admitted, ‘but if one tries to turn something off it can go suddenly quite chilly.’

From where she sat she could count one, two, three… four big radiators.

‘Temperature fluctuates hugely,’ he said. ‘Perhaps the absence of insulation. I’m not used to places like this. The countryside’s so demanding of effort. Townie to the core, I’m afraid.’ His face creased into a lopsided smile. ‘Merrily, I’m so sorry about the deception. Winterson… Stooke. It was beyond my—’

‘Don’t worry about it. Life can be complicated.’

‘Yes. Excuse me a moment, I’ll fetch some coffee.’

He strolled away through an open doorway, not looking back. Merrily leaned her head back into the sofa. You could see why someone might choose to rent Cole Barn. This room had been converted in broad strokes: the big fireplace, the stone flags, the rough beams of light oak. A room you could move into in about an hour, one size fits all.

The Stookes’ additions had been fairly minimal: this sofa and a plush swivel chair, a steel-framed desk, two dense cream rugs and enough utility shelves to hold a few hundred books. She tried to make out titles on spines, but she was too far away.

It was another world. A world of unlimited oil, while she and Jane were shivering over candles, like Scrooge’s clerk.

‘Merrily!’

Leonora, confident and graceful in a cream towelling robe, towel around her hair. Merrily stood up.

‘I’m sorry to just appear like this, but I couldn’t—’

‘No, I heard. My fault entirely.’

‘I won’t take up very much of your evening. Just wanted to check out a few things. Something you said in the church about Elliot infiltrating a fundamentalist cult. Something’s connected.’

‘Sit down… please.’ Leonora sank into the swivel chair. Her feet were bare. ‘That wasn’t really a serious possibility. I doubt he could stand mixing with people like that for more than an hour or two. Especially if they’re all like our friend in the post office.’

‘And was that the cult he’d thought about infiltrating? The Lord of the Light?’

‘He was angry when they started to target us. He wouldn’t have done it, wouldn’t have the patience. Merrily, I don’t want you to think we’re afraid of this woman. It’s just that if she does expose us, it’ll be in a horribly negative way. If we stay, I’ve no doubt it will all come out eventually, but I wanted us to become known as people first. There’s more to us than a book, you know?’

Odd, Merrily thought. They’d be disowning it in a minute. A germ of hypocrisy here, somewhere.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I don’t know what your tastes in music are, but if you wanted to meet some people, a friend of mine, Lol Robinson, is doing a little concert in the Black Swan tomorrow night. I could introduce you to a few open-minded people you might not have met, if you…’

‘That would be wonderful.’

‘Good. Meanwhile, I’ll talk to Shirley. Although this… may involve more than her. I was wondering if Elliot, in the course of his research into various cults, had encountered a guy called Nicholas Ellis? Fringe Anglican clergyman who ran a fundamentalist ministry just across the border, in Radnorshire.’

‘Not sure. There’s so many of them.’

‘Just I’ve learned in the past couple of hours that the Lord of the Light church was developed from the remains of Ellis’s organisation, and it’s possible he may still have some influence. From America. On the Net.’

Leonora called out, ‘Darling, have you heard of a man called Ellis?’

‘Father Nicholas Ellis,’ Merrily said, as Stooke came in with a loaded tray. ‘That’s not his real name, but it doesn’t matter.’

‘I’ve a computer file on him.’ Stooke laid the tray on the desk. ‘Had some correspondence with a reporter out there. I think he was linked to a corrupt itinerant evangelist called… McAllman?’

‘Yes.’ Merrily nodding. ‘Ellis’s was an unpleasant kind of ministry involving sexual exploitation of women. He’ll be blaming me, among others, for its demise in this country.’

‘This West woman is one of his disciples?’

‘It’s unlikely she ever encountered him in person. I just wondered if you’d had any contact. Couldn’t find any mention of him in The Hole in the Sky.’

‘It would be in the next book.’

‘Does he know?’

‘Possibly, I don’t know.’ Stooke looked at his wife. ‘Probably does now.’

‘Yeah, yeah, very stupid of me,’ Leonora said. ‘I didn’t think. Pretty damned angry that morning. The electricity meter was read after the last of the workmen moved out and before we moved in. Four or five weeks later we had a bill for over £900? Which, even allowing for the way fuel prices are going…’

‘Crazy,’ Merrily said. ‘You do like it warm in here, though, don’t you?’

‘This is oil. And wood? OK, a lot of lights, but we don’t use much electricity otherwise. Eat out most days. It’s not that we can’t afford to pay the bloody bill, it’s just that it’s so obviously wrong.’

‘Thanks.’ Merrily accepting a coffee from Stooke. ‘And that’s why you were asking the guy on the archaeological site where they got their power from?’

‘Just a thought that they might in some way be leeching electricity from here.’ Stooke brushed a hand through his grey-black spiky hair. ‘Bit of a long shot.’

‘We had it tested,’ Leonora said, ‘according to the complaints procedure. They said they could find absolutely nothing wrong. As they usually do. Anyway… that’s why I wasn’t in the best of moods when I stormed into the post office to pay the final demand instead of just posting it.’

Stooke sat down on the sofa, close to the stove. He didn’t seem to be aware of the heat.

‘The agents were no help at all. And the firm that owns the place is in France. Places like this, Middle England, they think they can charge what they like for half a job. I’d quite like to move out and try and get some of our money back, but—’

‘Darling, I couldn’t face it again. Not for a while. The sheer stress of moving, feeling like refugees. We’ve just…’ Leonora turned to Merrily ‘… had a run of trivial teething troubles, that’s all. It’s a barn conversion, nobody’s lived here before. Power surges. Bulbs popping. Wake up in the night and one of the smoke alarms is going off, which sets off all the other smoke alarms.’

‘They saw us coming,’ Stooke said.

‘So they know who you are?’ Merrily asked. ‘The agents.’

An irrational tension had set in. Power surges. Bulbs popping. Smoke alarms. How often had people brought domestic problems like that to her door?

‘The security services had a word with the agents,’ Stooke said. ‘Presumably pointing out that if anything leaked out from them, we’d have to move, putting the house back on the market.’

‘And they had enough difficulty letting it last time.’

‘Did they?’ Stooke looking up sharply. ‘Why?’

‘Because… the future of Coleman’s Meadow is undecided. You either get a whole army of new neighbours or a prehistoric tourist attraction. You were a godsend. As it were. What’s the atheist term for a godsend?’

‘Are you going to make atheist jokes all night, Merrily?’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘No, no.’ Stooke stood up awkwardly. ‘It’s me.’ He grimaced. ‘Fractious. Sorry.’

He folded his arms. Amazingly, in this temperature, he was still wearing the black fleece. Merrily smiled uncertainly. She felt swimmingly disorientated — that uncomfortable sensation of floating one step behind your senses. Too much heat, too much light. She stood up.

‘I’m going to have to go.’

‘I didn’t mean to offend—’

‘No, you didn’t. I have to drive to the other side of the county and I don’t want to be back too late in these conditions. Just one final thing. Shirley’s friend…’

Stooke looked blank. Merrily almost snatched the opportunity to say it was OK, it didn’t matter. Get herself out of the heat. She didn’t need this kind of complication.

‘Oh,’ Stooke said. ‘You mean the man who was watching the house.’

‘Erm… yeah.’

‘That made me angry. I don’t think Lenni’s seen him, but I spotted him a couple of times. He’d just be standing there at the top of the field, on the edge of the wood.’

‘The orchard?’

‘Yeah, whatever, the trees. I thought he was one of the archaeologists at first, and I shouted to him from the door, but he didn’t say anything. He just stood there. Well, it’s a public right of way, so you can’t actually order people off. I just went back into the house.’

‘What time of day was this?’

‘Early evening. Just on dusk. Five-ish? Next time I looked he’d gone. Then I saw him again, a couple of days ago.’

‘Same time?’

‘More or less. It was raining. Lenni’d gone into Leominster, to the shops.’

‘Antique shops.’ Leonora had pulled off the towels, was shaking out her red tresses. ‘So many in Leominster.’

‘And there was the guy again, getting soaked?’

Stooke went over to the desk, opened a drawer, took out some papers and extracted one.

Merrily said, ‘What was he like? Anybody I might recognise?’

‘He wasn’t close enough. I thought…’ Stooke handed her a folded sheet of A4. ‘We’d had that the same morning, and I suppose I saw him in those terms… as, presumably, I was expected to.’

We know why you are here.

We know why you have come NOW.

To call forth the old dark ones from

the woods and reclaim the stones for

your infernal master.

Stooke wrinkled his nose in distaste.

‘First time one of these… missives had mentioned the stones. I should’ve made the connection after your parish meeting. I suppose when the guy appeared again, I saw him as… like it says there.’

‘One of the dark ones from the woods?’

‘Some kind of Stone Age warrior. Short cloak or a skin, and a stick. Couldn’t see him clearly, too much mist. I was angry, but I did nothing. Should’ve gone out, but the field was soaking wet and… you don’t know what drugs these guys are on, do you?’

‘Who? The Church of the Lord of the Light? You really think so?’

‘Well, maybe not drugs.’ Stooke took the paper back, crumpled it angrily. ‘But how can they think we’re so stupid?’

‘You’re destroying the evidence.’

‘It’s a copy.’

Stooke looked into Merrily’s eyes, and she really didn’t know what to make of his expression.

‘I’d better be off,’ she said.

Merrily stood for a while, leaning against the Volvo, relishing the cold, even the rain, looking back across the hardstanding at what was, essentially, a new house, all its downstairs windows bright.

For a fraction of a second, the lights seemed to flare brighter still, as if there was a flash of lightning inside Cole Barn.

Don’t go there.

She got into the car, troubled.

42 Witch-Hunt

When Sister Cullen rang from the hospital, Bliss was parked in the entrance of Phase Two of the housing estate where Gyles Banks-Jones lived.

Just after five p.m., and well dark. Phase Two had barely been started and had no street lighting yet. Two hours ago Bliss had slid in next to the site hut, his rear wheels spinning, his lights already switched off. He was sure he could feel the car sinking into the mud, but at least the building site gave him an excellent view of Gyles’s house, directly opposite, and the house the other side of Gyles’s shared drive.

Steve Furneaux’s house. Still no car there, still no lights.

‘So would that be all right, Sister?’ Bliss said.

‘Don’t see why I can’t find that out, it being Sunday,’ Cullen said. ‘Although I shall expect some personal intervention from your good self the next time I fall foul of a speed camera.’

‘I hate them speed cameras, me.’

Both of them knowing Bliss had nil influence in Traffic.

‘Give me twenty minutes, then,’ Cullen said.

‘This is very decent of you, Sister.’

‘Merrily Watkins is a good woman.’

‘For a Prod?’

‘I don’t mess with religion, Mr Bliss.’

‘Very wise, Sister.’

Bliss settled back with his Thai Prawn sandwich and a can of shandy. He could afford to give it another couple of hours. Not like his life was going anywhere.

A Christmas tree was lit up in the Banks-Joneses’ front window, but no sign of movement behind it. Either Gyles and Mrs Banks-Jones were quietly talking it through, or — easier for Bliss to imagine — they were sunk into the sick, silent aftermath of a blazing row.

However, at some stage over the holiday period, Gyles would be sitting back in his favourite armchair, thinking how pleasant it was here, how warm, how safe. What a nice warm, safe life he’d had. Then getting jerked out of it by the memory of Bliss’s rancid Scouser’s voice going, Bang! That was your cell door, Gyles.

And in case Gyles, full of good whisky and maudlin Yuletide emotion, should then wish to make prison less of a prospect for the New Year, Bliss had given him his mobile number. Pretty sure that Gyles, at some stage, would ring with something he could use. But meanwhile — and more interesting — there was Steve.

Steve Furneaux revisited. Steve Furneaux who kept wiping his nose in Gilbies, but seemed to have no other cold symptoms. Bliss had registered it at the time, but you saw it all over the place these days. Even the red-spotted handkerchief: nosebleeds. If you were constructing the very model of a modern suburban recreational snorter of the white stuff, the computer simulation would be just so Steve Furneaux.

Because Gyles was still holding out about his source and refusing to involve his next-door neighbour on any level, Bliss had gone back to Alan Sandison, the Baptist minister.

Making Alan’s Christmas by telling him how unlikely it was, now that Gyles had coughed, that he would have to give evidence against any of his new neighbours. Alan had relaxed, much relieved — his conscience clear, all neighbourly relations intact. They’d had a cup of tea, an informal chat… quality time.

In the course of which it emerged that, yes, Alan did know Bliss’s friend Steve, from the council. Indeed, the first neighbourly gathering attended by the Sandisons, before they knew about the cocaine, had been a barbecue in Steve Furneaux’s garden.

And surely Alan knew Charlie Howe, didn’t he? Everybody knew Charlie…

Oh, the very friendly white-haired man with the stick, would that be?

Nice.

The chances of busting Steve for possession were remote. But Steve wouldn’t know that. Very likely that Steve, with his comfy council job and his blue-sky future on the line, was in a state of some anxiety. Which was also nice. No better time for an informal chat about Hereforward, Clement Ayling and — please God — Charlie Howe.

Just don’t let Steve have gone away for Christmas.

Bliss ran the engine to demist the windscreen and then, unwilling to push it too far with his old mate God, he rang his old bagman, Andy Mumford.

‘Boss,’ Mumford said. ‘’Ow’re you?’

The sheep-shit accent provoking a surprising tug of emotion, bringing back comfort-memories of the old days — last year, in fact — before Andy’s thirty had been up and he’d been shown the door. Poor sod was working with Jumbo Humphries, now — garage owner, feed dealer, private inquiry agent. It was either that or a position as some factory’s Head of Security, for which read caretaker, dogsbody, odd-job man.

‘And life’s exciting, Andy?’ Bliss said. ‘Lots of Land Rover chases?’

‘What bloody Humphries didn’t tell me,’ Mumford said, ‘was that when there’s no case on, I’m expected to work in the bloody warehouse, selling bags of bloody mixed corn to bloody chicken farmers.’

‘And how often is there no case?’

‘This is the sticks,’ Mumford said. ‘There’s a credit crunch. You work it out.’

‘I feel for you, Andy. Not as much as I feel for meself, but still…’

‘Made inquiries about getting back — cold-case squad, kind of thing,’ Mumford said mournfully.

‘And?’

‘Seems it would’ve helped if I’d been a DCI rather than a humble DS.’

‘Elitist bastards. Listen, Andy, you still got that little sister on the Plascarreg?’

‘Not my responsibility.’

‘No, don’t worry I’m not… It’s just I’ve had young George Wintle out there, looking for a new coke channel.’ Giving Mumford the back-story and the names: Banks-Jones, Furneaux. ‘He won’t get anywhere, but I was wondering what the buzz was, if any. Who’s running the Plascarreg this week?’

‘Jason Mebus grows up fast,’ Mumford said. ‘Real businessman now.’

‘I thought he’d been busted up a bit in a car crash.’

‘Broke his collarbone rolling a nicked motor, that was all. Young bones heal quick.’

‘You don’t like Jason, do you?’

‘No.’

‘Good thought, though, Andy. I’ll get George to talk to him.’

‘He won’t talk. Not to the likes of Wintle.’

‘Talk to you?’

‘Mabbe.’

‘Cold-case buggers don’t know what they’re missing.’ Bliss took a breath, went in casual. ‘You ever see anything of Charlie Howe these days, Andy?’

Heavy pause.

‘No,’ Mumford said. ‘Nothing.’

This was a little tricky. It was widely rumoured that Mumford had done some cleaning-up after Charlie over the undiscovered murder in the Frome Valley, way back when Charlie had been at Bliss’s level and Mumford just a sprog — so that was excusable, just. All the same, a touchy subject. Safer to keep this contemporary.

‘You know of any link between Charlie and the late Clem Ayling?’

Mumford found a short laugh.

‘Wondered how long it’d be before you got round to Ayling. I did hear your role in that had got a bit shrunk, mind.’

‘And you heard that from…?’

‘Pint with Terry Stagg. Funny arrangement all round, Terry says. Why would Ma’am set up an incident room within walking distance of Gaol Street?’

‘Only if she wanted a soundproof box,’ Bliss said.

‘Ah.’

‘He’s never liked me, you know that, Andy.’

‘Charlie? No, I don’t reckon he has.’

‘Not since I got too interested in the Frome Valley.’

No reaction from Mumford.

‘Where I won’t be going again, you understand. It’s history. I accept that.’

Best to underline it: no question of Mumford’s youthful indiscretion ever being exhumed.

‘All right,’ Mumford said.

‘But if Charlie’s name crops up on the edge of an inquiry I still get interested. And Charlie knows that, and Annie knows it.’

‘This connection with Ayling — that just the council?’

‘Goes a bit further. Charlie and Ayling’d both got themselves co-opted on to this quango think-tank thingy known as Hereforward. Which was Ayling’s last meeting. Walks out of it, never seen again attached to his head.’

‘Never heard of it.’

‘You ever heard of Charlie doing… Charlie?’

‘Coke?’

‘Or anything.’

‘Charlie don’t like to lose control.’

‘Oh.’

‘Women’s Charlie’s thing. Young women. Always a charmer.’

‘Still?’

‘Older he gets, younger he likes them. Jumbo was telling me about a divorce case he was working, led to this isolated farmhouse in the Black Mountains where there was what you might call communal activities. Jumbo seen Charlie through his binoculars, once.’

‘That’s interesting.’

‘I will tell you one thing, though, boss,’ Mumford said. ‘Charlie en’t a killer.’

‘That’s a firm statement, Andy.’

‘He’s a cover-upper, is what Charlie is.’

Bliss flicked the wipers again. Still no sign of life in Steve’s house. He switched off the engine.

‘And a bully,’ Mumford said. ‘Whatever he done, always he done it for the best of reasons and anyone who suggests otherwise he’s right in their face and they better watch their step, else they might not have a job for very long. If you see where I’m coming from.’

‘‘I hate that,’ Bliss said.

‘Power thing, see.’

‘Hate it, Andy.’

‘What I’m saying, unless you got something real solid, not an easy man to lean on.’

‘I realise that.’

‘On the other hand,’ Mumford said, ‘young Mebus, he thinks he’s smart but he en’t. So if you want somebody to talk to Mebus, on the quiet, like, civilian rules, I’m up for that. Don’t take this the wrong way, boss, but you was always good to me. Especially in the last days. And the business over Robbie. I appreciate that.’

‘That’s very civil of you, Andy.’

‘I expect you’d return the favour, any openings come up where you could put in a word.’

‘If there’s anybody left who listens to me.’

‘Bear it in mind, anyway, boss,’ Mumford said.

Bliss smiled into the darkness. Mumford’s subtext: anything… just get me away from the mixed corn.

‘I’ve gorra few problems, Andy.’

‘Aye,’ Mumford said. ‘I know.’

Bliss was finishing off the last Thai Prawn sarnie when his mobile went.

‘Not convenient to explain further,’ Eileen Cullen said. ‘But it’s as you said. All right? Have to go now.’

‘Thanks, Sister. I owe you one.’

‘You certainly do.’

So… the old bastard.

And it would go on, the eternal triangle of Annie Howe, Charlie Howe and Frannie Bliss, until one of the corners dropped off.

He thought about Mumford, a good detective lumbering through most of his career as a DC, kicked out with the digital camera and the inscribed tankard, facing the rest of his mobile years as a part-time PI, part-time corn salesman.

He thought of himself, young Frannie making a fresh start still in his twenties: nice country town, not many streets where you couldn’t see a hill. Nice, laid-back country people, not as sharp as Scousers, most of them, but not as bitter either. Thinking he’d have a fair chance of promotion and getting it, too, in the early years.

And then it stopped, and he was looking at a bunch of unexceptional DCIs five years younger than him, then seven years younger. Looking particularly at Annie Howe, acting superintendent. A crap detective. A frigging shite detective, with a dad who’d been a bent detective.

And a bully. All bullies were cowards. His dad was always telling him that when he was a kid. You didn’t give in to a bully.

The rain was heavier now, and he switched on the engine and the demister. In the old days, someone on the occupied part of the estate would’ve noticed a car parked without lights and come over to check it out. Not any more. Not with new knife-crime stats on the box every other night. They wouldn’t ring the police either, because they knew the police wouldn’t come, or maybe they’d drop by next day, if they were passing.

After about two minutes, Karen Dowell called and, for a while, Bliss brightened up.

‘It’s ridiculous, boss.’

‘Where are you, Karen?’

‘I’m at home. You see it on the box?’

‘I haven’t gorra box in the car.’

‘Man helping with inquiries?’

Bliss lurched in his seat.

‘They’ve pulled?’

‘Nah, it’s Wilford Hawkes.’

‘Karen.’ Bliss slumped back. ‘You’re kidding me.’

‘Couldn’t believe it either. I actually rang the school to confirm, talked to Terry. What happened, they turned over Hawkes’s place and found he’d just put a brand new chain on his twenty-year-old chainsaw. Cleaned it all up himself, like new. So now they’ve stripped his workshop, sent a vanload to forensic, and they’re asking him the same questions, over and over again, in the hope he’ll slip up, give some different answers. Which he does, of course, everybody does in the end. Poor little bugger doesn’t know what day it is.’

‘This is Howe?’

‘She’s had Brent at him now. Both of them, in fact.’

‘Ms Nasty and Dr Nasty. I suppose it’s occurred to them that Hawkes is half Ayling’s size and nearly as old?’

‘It was a single stab wound,’ Karen said. ‘Not much of a wound, not much blood. In fact, they were still a bit iffy about it till the PM showed what it did to the aorta. Ayling would probably’ve been dead within minutes.’

‘And Willy would’ve known exactly where to stick it, would he?’

‘Could’ve been luck. On the other hand, he was in the Army, way back. Paras. Commando training?’

‘But look at him now, Karen!’

‘Yeah, well, they think he may’ve had a partner. They’re going through Jane Watkins’s database, name by name. Paying visits.’

‘Witch-hunt?’

‘Yeah, funny you should say that. One situation — listen to this — Terry was telling me these witches up towards Ross, friends of Willy’s, they thought it was carol singers from the church and wouldn’t open the door? And Brent… he had it smashed in? Smashed in. All right, maybe there was a bit more to it, and they found some cannabis, but it’s still bloody madness, Frannie.’

Bliss thought about his own dawn raid on Gyles.

‘Just be glad you’re not part of it,’ Karen said.

‘Yeh.’

Not part of anything. Not even part of a family any more.

‘Mind you,’ Karen said, ‘don’t forget it was you who first pointed them at Dinedor.’

‘Yeh, but that—’

‘Goodnight, boss.’

Bliss sat there, shaking his head.

Well, sure, Dinedor needed checking out. But only in tandem with the possibility that somebody wanted them to think it was all about Dinedor. An investigation this size was more like snooker than frigging rugby — a lot of balls on the table and you didn’t just pick one up and run with it.

Unless, of course, you thought your old man might get potted along the way.

Bliss laughed, starting to despise himself. He could stay here all night waiting for Furneaux, and wake up at first light, wheels firmly embedded in the shite, and have to ask Gyles to give him a push, and look like a dick.

When what he was really avoiding…

He leaned back, took a long breath. Well, why not?

Why the fuck not?

He wrenched the car out of the mud at the fourth attempt and put on his lights. He didn’t know if this was going to be right, but knew he wouldn’t sleep now if he didn’t go for it, and the thought of dragging himself back to the empty house at Marden, back to the pile of Chrissie cards on the mat, the spread of white envelopes with a few red ones, like blood in the snow…

On the way to Leominster, he crawled through five pools of flash-flood in the road. He passed twenty-seven houses and bungalows with Christmas lights all over their walls and wrapped around trees and chimneys. Didn’t know why he counted them.

Once, disgracefully, he pulled in to the side of the road and wept and almost turned back.

In Leominster, there was no flooding, and no lights at all in or outside the Victorian three-storey terraced house where Charlie Howe lived.

43 Lute of the Frome

There was, inevitably, an element of ceremonial. Merrily had slipped out of her wet shoes in the stone and panelled hall, and that seemed symbolic now, as Al Boswell laid the wooden case on the long oak table below a big copper lantern.

Al must know there was no time to waste. Although the River Frome seemed to be staying within its banks, the duck pond in front of the Hop Museum was brimming, the green and gold gypsy caravan up to its axles in water darker than beer.

‘We didn’t think you’d come,’ Sally Boswell said. ‘Nobody should be out on a night like this.’

Sally’s long white hair was down. Al was spindly and ageless, like some woodland sprite, Sally the lovely mortal he’d abducted by means of Romani magic.

‘The drukerimaskri?’ Al said. ‘Of course we knew she would come.’

He’d had the guitar ready for her. She’d expected him to take her down to his workshop, through the exhibition of hop-growing memorabilia, old pictures of the Romani who had travelled to the Frome Valley for the annual hop harvest. But Al had known there wasn’t time.

When he opened the case, the strings of the lute-shaped dark-wood guitar shivered in a draught from somewhere.

‘God, Al, it’s so…’

Merrily leaned over the case but didn’t touch. The air felt fresh after the stifling Cole Barn, and the night felt unreal, as if she’d become part of some mythic saga involving the lost lyre of Orpheus or something.

‘It’s too dim in here,’ Al said, ‘but if you look into the soundhole when you get it home, you will see, in the wood below it, a quite perfectly proportioned cross.’

‘You did that?’

‘No, no.’ Al laughed lightly. ‘The cross was naturally in the grain, and I placed it under the soundhole. In your honour. Would you like to bless the instrument before you take it away? Drukerimaskri?’

Romani for a woman priest.

Al bowed and straightened up, spreading his arms, revealing the golden lettering on his black sweatshirt:

‘I think,’ Sally said briskly, ‘that we can consider the instrument to be blessed already and not delay Merrily any longer. It’s a terribly cruel night. I heard on the radio that all the bed-and-breakfast places in Hereford were full because of people trapped in the city. How will they get home for Christmas? How will you get home, Merrily?’

‘I don’t need to go through Hereford.’

‘You should have waited until tomorrow.’

‘Couldn’t. I’ve too much on and, besides… he’s doing a concert at the Swan in Ledwardine tomorrow night. His first. He’s a bit worried about it, playing on his own doorstep and I thought… Well, I was going to give this to him on Christmas Day, but…’

‘You’ve driven across the hell that is Herefordshire on the worst night of the year.’ Al’s eyes lit up and his face split like a polished wooden puppet’s into a crooked but radiant smile. ‘This is love, I think.’

‘Yes. I—’

‘But you’re worried.’

‘This and that.’

She’d put Cole Barn on hold to concentrate on the road, getting the guitar back home.

Al studied her.

‘Tell me… where does Nick Drake come into this?’

‘I don’t know.’ Merrily felt a small seepage of alarm in her stomach. ‘I mean, apart from him being Lol’s original inspiration. But you knew that, didn’t you?’

‘Of course he knew that,’ Sally said. ‘Al’s anything but psychic.’

‘Alas, she’s right. Disregard my whimsy.’ Al closed the guitar case, held it out to her like a sheaf of flowers. ‘Take her home.’

‘Al, you’ll have to hold on to her while I get my chequebook out.’

‘Pay me after Christmas,’ Al said. ‘As the sofa retailers say.’

‘Absolutely not. Just tell me how much. It’s not a problem. I’ve some money put by—’

‘I haven’t yet decided on a suitable price,’ Al said.

‘Please. Let’s not quarrel about this. I want to pay the proper price and Lol would want that, too. Especially Lol, because of… what happened to the other one.’

‘Ah, yes. The man who had it smashed, as a warning. Leave a hundred pounds in cash on the table. Do you have a hundred pounds? If not, fifty will do. Don’t cross me, drukerimaskri, or the curse will come down, and you know how good we are at this.’

‘I do have a hundred pounds, but… it’s just a deposit, Al.’

‘There we are, then.’ Al thrust the guitar case at her and then sprang back, laughing, all limbs, like a grasshopper. ‘Tell me… does Laurence feel guilt, because the young man died unfulfilled, unrecognised, and now Laurence is… almost halfway famous?’

‘Nick Drake?’ Merrily said. ‘You’re talking about Nick Drake again?’

She wasn’t about to say that Lol had seen the destruction of the Boswell, the finest handmade acoustic guitar in the country, as a sign of his unworthiness. A confirmation that he’d never be as good as Nick Drake.

‘Leave it, Al,’ Sally said, and Merrily was grateful.

Before she left the Hop Museum, she put down all the notes in her wallet without counting them.

‘A deposit, Al.’

Before she drove away into the cold, liquid night, she sat in the back seat with the guitar case across her knees and, without thinking too hard about whether this was right or reasonable, she asked God to bless the Boswell.

In Lol’s house, Jane sat with Eirion next to the wood stove in the mouth of the inglenook, sipping hot chocolate, listening to Lol’s new music.

Her back almost touching the stove, Jane felt this odd, warm shimmer as Lol’s voice rose to meet a high guitar note. Lol sat on the edge of the sofa, looking apprehensive, the guitar on its stand under the window.

The room was lit by a fat candle on the low table, the music crisp and real, from the stereo. Lol had made demos on mini-disc of most of the new songs. He could do concerts now, even fairly intimate folk-club-type gigs, but he was still too shy to play live in front of friends. Like he felt that people who knew him would see through the songs to all the flaws in his character, his weaknesses.

Crazy?

Not when you knew the Lol Robinson story. Barely twenty and convicted of sexually assaulting a fourteen-year-old girl while on tour with Hazey Jane. An offence actually committed, while Lol was asleep, by the band’s bass-player, who’d walked away, leaving Lol on probation, unjustly disgraced, disowned by his creepy Pentecostalist parents, swallowed by the psychiatric system. His career wrecked, his spirit smashed.

It was Jane’s mum who’d finally brought him out of the past. But before he even knew Mum, Lucy Devenish had begun to reassemble him. Lucy and the poems of Thomas Traherne, who’d seen the essence of paradise in this border landscape. Found happiness. Felicity.

Before dying at thirty-seven.

Which meant that Lol was older than Traherne now. Oh God, nothing was ever perfect, nothing was easy.

He’d turned three of Traherne’s 17th-century poems into songs, and it couldn’t have been easy at all; they all had strange, archaic rhythms.

‘We can illustrate this no problem,’ Eirion said. ‘I’ve got dozens of pictures from last summer that we shot along the ley. All very lush and pastoral. It’s the Elgar stuff I’m not sure about. Maybe I could download some pictures from the Net. Could I hear that again, Lol?’

Lol located it on the disc. The song was just called ‘Elgar’, dealing with the composer’s thoughts as he lay dying, but it wasn’t morbid; it was, in the end, uplifting.

When it was over, Lol said, ‘People misunderstood Elgar for years, thought he was too grand. Just an ordinary guy, lower middle-class. Insecure…’

‘Right.’

Jane was getting a real feel for this now, how it all tied in. Elgar had been a friend of Alfred Watkins and had actually had his picture taken with Watkins in what was almost certainly Coleman’s Meadow. Lol had written a new song about Alfred Watkins, using lines from the seminal Old Straight Track set to this kind of chugging, pulsing rhythm, like you were following a ley on foot, the music speeding up as you reached what Jane was certain had to be Cole Hill at sunrise, midsummer.

Whether some of the crass bastards who drank and dined at the Black Swan would get any of this was anybody’s guess and, for a moment, Jane could hear it all being drowned out by whoops and laughter and inane chat.

And then realised she was actually hearing voices. Raised. Outside the window. Raised voices, excitement. Or panic.

Lol stood up, turned the music down and went over to the window, wiping off condensation with his sleeve.

‘Something seems to have happened.’

Merrily had taken what seemed to be the safe route, through Bromyard, but who could tell? The entrances to several side roads were blocked by portable signs, some of them semi-submerged.

She flicked the wipers to double speed, driving like a learner first time out, hands on the wheel at ten to two, unblinking, the radio on low. Halfway to Leominster, the Radio Hereford and Worcester all-night flood special said,

‘… And if you’ve just tuned in and you’re heading into Hereford from the south on the Abergavenny or Ross roads, police advise turning back because the Belmont roundabout has now been closed. Belmont roundabout is closed.’

Not good. Halfway to becoming the Isle of Hereford.

The wipers strained and the surface water tugged at the wheels, but she made it around Tenbury Wells, its town-centre streets turned into canals, according to the radio.

‘They knew this was coming, look,’ a caller to the station said, ‘and they’ve never spent a penny on flood prevention. When was this river last cleaned out? Tell me that.’

Merrily switched off the radio. Getting repetitive, the litany of recrimination. She followed a silver container lorry at 25 m.p.h. all the way to Leominster. The town centre was clear, its lights dulled, its swilled streets empty. She drove up the hill towards the roundabout beyond Morrisons supermarket. There was little traffic. She thought she saw Frannie Bliss’s yellow Honda Civic, same blue sticker in the rear window, parked at the side of the road, but it couldn’t have been.

Back into the countryside. Only ten minutes from home now, in normal conditions. Water was pumping out of the fields into the basin of the road, and the rain ricocheted from the tarmac like a thousand plucked stitches in the headlights.

On the passenger seat the mobile chimed.

Merrily drove up onto the grass verge, kept the engine running, watching the silver container lorry disappearing between dirty curtains of rain.

‘Go on then,’ Huw Owen said. ‘Let’s hear it. What happened at Stooke’s place?’

All the way to Knights Frome and all the way back she’d been blanking this out. It needed a cool head.

‘I was going to call you when I got a bit nearer home. I can’t park here, Huw, I’ll have to—’

‘Christ, you’re not bloody well out in this, are you? It’s just I rang your landline but t’machine were on.’

‘I had to go and see someone. I’ll find somewhere and call you back.’

‘Just get home.’

‘No, we do need to talk about this. Give me two minutes.’

44 Nightwatchman

Bliss watched him walking stiffly down the pavement, leaning only slightly on his aluminium crutch. Once, he stopped and lifted it up to point at something. Only Charlie Howe could make a lightweight crutch look like a twelve-bore.

Bliss was relieved to see him. At least somebody was coming home tonight.

Just a chat, Charlie, one to one. Only way to deal with this. Get the elephant out of the toilet cubicle.

Charlie was under a big black umbrella held by a woman with big blonde hair. Not young young but had to be a good thirty years younger than Charlie. About Annie’s age, in fact. Annie’s mother, Bliss had heard, was like Cleopatra — ancient history.

As well as the brolly, the woman was carrying a plastic carrier bag with what looked like bottles in it. Bliss guessed they’d been to Morrisons. Maybe Charlie had even met her there; supermarkets were good for pick-ups.

Whoever she was, she’d need to be persuaded to leave them alone for an hour. Bliss got out of the car as they went in through Charlie’s gate, up the short path to the front door, where Charlie started fumbling in his pocket for his keys.

Bliss trotted up behind.

‘Hold your crutch, Charlie?’

The woman spun, but Charlie turned slowly, water crashing down on the umbrella, the downpour swollen by overflow from the guttering.

‘Least I can do,’ Bliss said, ‘after all you’ve done for me.’

Charlie leaned his crutch against the door frame, to show he could manage without it, peered out from under the brolly. He looked like he always had: ski-resort suntan, white hair in a crewcut out of vintage movies with Elvis in them.

‘Brother Bliss, would that be?’

‘Just happened to be passing, Charlie. Thought I’d see how you were getting on with the new plazzie hip.’

Charlie said nothing.

‘Lucky to get it done before the festive season. I heard they’d been suspended, all the hip ops. Virus? Ward closures?’

‘Wasn’t affected,’ Charlie said. ‘Got in just in time. What do you want, Brother Bliss?’

Bliss stood there. He was soaked through already. He could feel the damp on his chest and the weight of dark shoulder pads of saturation. It didn’t look as though Charlie was going to introduce his friend.

‘We have a chat, Charlie?’

‘Certainly. Ring my secretary. Make an appointment.’

‘I was thinking now.’

‘Not convenient, I’m afraid.’

‘Do a good job, then, did he?’ Bliss said. ‘Bit of a whizz with hips, what I hear, Mr Shah.’

‘I’m told it all went very smoothly,’ Charlie said. ‘You’re getting wet.’

‘Nice feller, too, everybody says that,’ Bliss said.

‘A gentleman.’

‘Pity about his kid.’

Bliss stared at Charlie, blinking the rain out of his eyes. In truth, he couldn’t even see Charlie any more, only a black mist. He just sensed a thin smile.

‘What are you doing, Brother Bliss?’

Drowning, Bliss thought.

The Zippo sputtered and sparked before finding a flame. Merrily lit up. She’d pulled into a long lay-by behind a tump of gravel, where the Leominster road let you into the bypass. She was two miles from home and about half a mile from the bridge at Caple End, where she’d sat in Bliss’s car and he’d told her about the pieces of quartz shining in Clem Ayling’s eye sockets.

‘Now that,’ Huw Owen said, ‘is a bugger.’

Didn’t think she’d forgotten anything: fluctuating temperature, bulbs popping, smoke alarms whining in the night, car failing to start, and that staggering electricity bill.

’Something taking the energy,’ Huw said. ‘There were a fairly well-documented case over at Brecon some years ago, before your time.’

‘I’ve heard about it.’

‘Lot of others I’ve heard about where all that occurs alongside a volatile.’

‘If they need the heating on at that level because, if they turn it down, it’s suddenly colder than the grave… OK, you could say that’s a case of soft city folk. But she isn’t from the city.’

‘What was the attitude when they were telling you all this?’

‘Annoyed. Annoyed at the level of workmanship, annoyed at the electricity company, the owners, the owners’ agents…’

‘Nowt more than annoyed?’

‘Like it wouldn’t even cross their minds, either of them. But, then, they have an image to support. How could they not be in total, one hundred per cent denial?’

‘It’s a bugger, lass.’

‘Don’t keep just saying that, Huw. What do I do about it? I get called in all the time on stories far less convincing than this. First rule of deliverance?’

Huw laughed. Both of them remembering their first encounter on Huw’s deliverance course in his parish deep in the heart of SAS training country.

First rule of deliverance: always carry plenty of fuse wire.

Second rule: never leave the premises without at least a prayer.

As if…

‘Of course,’ Huw said, ‘as you say, it might be a scam.’

‘Might very well be. She’s told me about his need for new material. How book two might have to be just a diary of his adventures since the publication of Hole. Thing is, she was very frank about all that, about him being basically a hack with no great evangelical need to convert society to non-belief.’

‘Happen lull you into a sense of false security. You wouldn’t’ve gone near that place otherwise, would you?’

‘Maybe not. And yet… I’ll tell you one thing. There was a look Stooke gave me just before I left — this is Stooke, not Lensi. It was full of almost a kind of pain. Like he’s saying, Denial? Of course I’m in denial. What the hell would you expect?’

‘All right,’ Huw said. ‘Let’s talk about the figure in the field. On the edge of the orchard?’

‘It was too dark to get him to show me the exact spot. Apart from it bucketing down.’

‘Assuming it’s not a scam,’ Huw said. ‘Nightwatchman, you reckon?’

Charlie didn’t even look at the blonde woman. He didn’t stop looking at Bliss. He held the keys out over his shoulder.

‘Make us some coffee, Sasha.’

Accepting the umbrella, keeping it well away from Bliss as the blonde went into the house and lights came on.

‘You know where my daughter is tonight, brother?’

Still at her desk, popping pills to stay awake? Having Willy Hawkes woken up with a halogen spotlight in the eyes, every hour on the hour till he coughed to Ayling’s murder?

‘No,’ Bliss said.

The water was sluicing over his ears, down the back of his neck until he could feel it cold on his spine.

‘Private party in the Home Secretary’s constituency,’ Charlie said. ‘They been good friends for some years.’

‘Of course, yeh. Keep forgetting how relatively local the Home Seckie is. Think Annie’ll be offered a Home Office consultancy? House of Lords next? Baroness Howe. Has a ring of… I dunno… destiny.’

‘In your dreams, boy. Anne’s a copper through and through. In the genes, it is. She en’t going nowhere she won’t be able to pick up the likes of you and drop you where you belong. And neither am I.’

Bliss had started to shiver. You could go through a car-wash on full cycle and not get this wet. And Charlie in the dry, not a droplet on him.

Story of Charlie’s life.

‘Well, for her sake you can only hope…’ Bliss wiped a hand across his face ‘… that Annie’s DNA managed to bypass the bent gene.’

The rain was suddenly lit up in colours. Bliss turned to see one of those charity Christmas floats rolling past, probably on its way home but the lights still blazing, Bliss thinking, Jesus, did I really just say that?

And turning back round to find the rubber foot of Charlie’s metal crutch up against his throat.

‘Didn’t catch that, Francis? Hard to make out what you’re saying in this rain.’

Well, he could snatch the crutch away, and then maybe Charlie would lose his footing on the wet, slimy driveway. And the woman would, of course, be watching, from an upstairs window, a witness to this unprovoked assault on an elderly man recovering from hip surgery. Yes, that was one option.

Bliss backed off.

‘Why don’t we go inside, then? Where it’s quiet. Lot to talk about, Councillor. Talk about Hereforward?’

The presence of the woman complicated everything. The woman and the rain. The noise of the rain meant there was no way neighbours or passers-by could overhear anything that might embarrass Councillor Howe and make it sensible to get Bliss inside.

A quiet one-to-one. Even half an hour would do it. Mumford was probably right, Charlie wasn’t a killer. Just a cover-upper. Official cover-upper for Hereforward. All quangos had secrets, and this one…

‘Why don’t you just go home, Brother Bliss?’ Charlie lowering the crutch. ‘Modern policing got no use for a one-man band.’

‘Yeh, well, that’s because no fucker wants to take individual responsibility any more. The new ethos of arse-shielding, Char—’

He was spluttering. The rain was in his mouth. Even the weather was on Charlie’s side. This was a waste of time. Nothing for him here. Nothing but more grief, another chance to test his self-destruct button.

‘Go home, boy,’ Charlie said amiably. ‘Go back to Liverpool or wherever it was you crawled from. Long outstayed your welcome down yere, you must see that. You got no friends, you got no—’

‘Shah told you the lies his son fed him.’ Bliss had started to shout, just needing to get it out. ‘You told Shah you’d get it dealt with.’

‘—got no wife, now, either. No wife… no kids?’

How the…? Bliss clawed rain out of his eyes.

‘You’re a sick little man, Brother Bliss. Come down yere thinking you were God’s gift to West Mercia. Smart young city copper full of the ole Northern grit, show the country boys how it’s done. Make a swift rise to the top.’

‘That’s bollock—’

‘Only it never happened. You weren’t good enough. Fooled ’em for a while and then they saw what you were. And now you en’t going no higher and you know it and my, that’s made you bitter, ennit? Bitter, twisted, sick little man. I know about you, Brother Bliss, known for a long time.’

‘You don’t know shit!’

‘But I do know your father-in-law.’ Charlie raising the umbrella so Bliss could see him grinning. ‘Didn’t know that, did you?’

Shit, shit, shit.

‘Same lodge?’ Bliss tried.

‘Same county, Brother Bliss, that’s all it takes. Very small county and you got a big, big mouth. You never deserved Kirsty. Nice girl, good, sensible head on her shoulders. Well rid of you, boy. Well rid.’

‘You know the truth, Charlie?’ Bliss in free fall now. ‘I used to love being in this city when I first came. It was small, and it had… this freshness. Wherever you looked you could see a green field or a hill or a wood. You could breathe.’

‘Stand there much longer, boy, your breathing days gonner be limited. Get pneumonia and die, and what a mercy that’d be, for all of us.’

‘I used to like the way you could breathe. And now…’ Bliss took a step forward, soaking socks fused to his frozen feet. ‘Now all I can see is frigging greed and opportunism, and I don’t enjoy breathing any more because whenever I breathe in I can smell somebody like you. I can fucking smell you, Charlie.’

Jesus, how pathetic was this?

Charlie stepped back, and his front door opened behind him. He let down his umbrella, gave it a good shake in Bliss’s direction and went into the warm and shut the door very quietly behind him.

Through the windscreen, Merrily saw small smears of light, like glowing tadpoles.

Nightwatchman.

Huw had always preferred his own euphemisms: visitors, volatiles, insomniacs, hitch-hikers. Flavouring the unknowable with a measure of comforting familiarity.

‘That’s your word for a guardian, is it?’

‘An entity or thought-form attached to the site to deter intruders who might want to damage or corrupt it,’ Huw said. ‘We could talk about cases where thunder and lightning resulted from somebody sticking a spade into a burial mound. And horrific phantasms, obviously. But you probably know all them. How close is the barn to the buried stones, lass?’

‘Next field. Tell me about nightwatchmen, Huw.’

‘Happen less harmful than they look, in most cases.’

‘Less harmful? How?’

‘Sometimes the images people receive may appear demonic. But that might be more a result of their own conditioning. If we operate on the basis that true demonic is, by definition, satanic and therefore something explicable only in terms of Christian theology, well… Neolithic’s a long time pre-Christian. Unless it’s been reactivated by more recent activity, you might be looking at no more than an old imprint.’

‘By definition, a place memory without soul or consciousness.’

‘If you accept, as I would, that ritual sites were usually in places of strong natural energy, that makes sense, aye.’

‘What if it’s something of human origin?’

‘Way back?’

‘For the sake of argument.’

‘Happen a ritual sacrifice, then. Could even be a willing sacrifice, someone who’d elected or consented to look after the ritual site for all eternity and was then ceremonially slaughtered and buried there, or cremated.’

‘But that’s all theoretical, isn’t it? And can only ever be. Goes too far back.’

‘In that case, if there’s owt there you’ve got a few centuries of experience to tap. You could talk to folk. Got to be some memory.’

‘But if the people living there have not requested assistance and are never likely to…’

Merrily paused for a reality check — if the Stookes were lying, all this was academic.

In the windscreen, the tadpoles were still aglow and wriggling. The lights of Ledwardine? Couldn’t be. Not from this distance, in conditions of seriously reduced visibility.

‘You could still go it alone, if you felt it was necessary. Or you could — as there’s already controversy over it — offer to bless the stones. And then make it a bit more than a blessing.’

‘That’s not a bad idea.’

‘You’d have to decide, on the evidence, whether a personality is involved,’ Huw said. ‘Whether you’re asking for the place to be calmed or a spirit to be released. You could argue that if the stones are about to be put back up, with a conservation order, well… a nightwatchman’s entitled to redundancy. Retirement. A nice, long rest.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Keep us informed, anyroad,’ Huw said. ‘Now bugger off home.’

He was gone.

Merrily got out a cigarette and smoked half of it before fastening her seat belt and leaning over to make sure that the Boswell guitar case was safely wedged in the gap between the front and rear seats. She switched on the wipers, and pulled into the road. The lights in the windscreen were closer, and they actually were moving and some of them were blue. Shadows paddled across the lights. She flipped the headlamps up to full beam.

Two men coming towards her, carrying something between them.

White lettering on blue.

Merrily braked.

But hang on, this was the link to the bypass, the great lifeline. It was on fairly high ground, this couldn’t be about flooding. We never looked back, Lyndon Pierce said. Benefits of progress, people.

She lowered her window. Guy coming over — traffic cop, yellow slicker, fluorescent armbands. Merrily leaned out into the rain.

‘What’s happened?’

‘Road’s closed.’

‘Yes, I can — What is it, a crash? An accident?’

Always seemed to be one, coming up to Christmas. Joy to the world.

‘Can I ask you to turn round, please, madam? Just turn round here and get yourself back on the main road.’

‘But how long—?’

‘And take a different route, if you don’t mind.’

‘But the other road’s going to be flooded, isn’t it? How do I get into Ledwardine?’

‘You don’t,’ the traffic cop said. ‘Nobody does tonight.’ He sighed. ‘Or even, I’d say, this side of Christmas…’