All of a Winter's Night E-Book

Phil Rickman

• Herausgeber: Corvus
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Merrily Watkins is the most singular of crime fiction protagonists... As ever [Rickman]'s supremely skillful at teasing out the menace that lies behind English folk customs and legends and weaving them into a compelling contemporary narrative. - Mail on Sunday IN THE DARK HEART OF THE COUNTRYSIDE... When Aidan Lloyd's bleak funeral is followed by a nocturnal ritual in the fog, it becomes all too clear that Aidan, son of a wealthy farmer, will not be resting in peace. Aidan's hidden history has reignited an old feud, and a rural tradition begins to display its sinister side. It's already a fraught time for Merrily Watkins, her future threatened by a bishop committed to restricting her role as diocesan exorcist for Hereford. Suddenly there are events she can't talk about as she and her daughter Jane find themselves potentially on the wrong side of the law. In the city of Hereford, DI Frannie Bliss, investigating a shooting, must confront the apparent growth of organised crime, also contaminating the countryside. On the Welsh border, the old ways are at war with the modern world. As the days shorten and the fog gives way to ice and snow, a savage killing draws Merrily Watkins into a conflict centred on one of Britain's most famous medieval churches, its walls laden with ancient symbolism. Midwinter of the Spirit, televised last year to worldwide critical acclaim, was the first novel to reflect the reality of exorcism in modern Britain. All of a Winter's Night is the 15th episode in this electrifying series.

Leseprobe

Contents

All of a Winter’s Night

Part One

1 The dead of Ledwardine

2 Cold air

3 Trespass

4 No visible light

Part Two

5 No justice

6 Many of us

7 Cut sideways

8 Zapping the cat

9 No mates

10 Wrongness

11 Crow-people

12 Having a laugh

13 Best year

14 Initiation

15 Space to settle

16 Turn her head away

Part Three

17 A dot on the map

18 Lucky day

19 Wild West

20 Grave goods

21 Latchkey kid

22 Confessional

23 Inhale the darkness

24 Big farming

Part Four

25 Looking at dead police

26 Nothing set in stone

27 Being friendly

28 Severe stomach wound

29 Safe ground

30 Shopped

31 An oven

32 First brick

33 Nice suit

34 Concrete

35 Catching murderers

36 Man of Leaves

37 Engage

38 Each of our dyings

Part Five

39 Tent over the sundial

40 This side of the Second Coming

41 In memory of me

42 Trust

43 Favours past

44 Hatched

45 Talking to the help

46 Forlorn

47 Go figure

48 A line

49 Made up

50 Tarot

51 Anybody but God

52 Turning over the death card

53 Tingle

54 Small favours

55 Awakening

56 Intentional suffering

57 The fool

58 The man he was

59 Hereford’s finest

60 Things that move

61 Hassma

62 Fairy tales

63 Lamping

Part Six

64 The best is yet to come

65 Evening work

66 Complicating the ministry

67 Harbinger

68 Foliate face

69 What we are

70 Out of it

71 Oaf

Credits and background

All of a Winter’s Night

Part One

When I speak of darkness, I mean the absence of knowledge

Anon, C14thThe Cloud of UnknowingEd. William Johnston (Doubleday, 1973)

1

The dead of Ledwardine

THERE WERE QUESTIONS you learned never to ask Jane. One of them was, Won’t it wait till morning?

Awakened by the scrape of the bedroom door, Merrily sat up in bed, dizzied by the cold. The bedroom window was opaque. There had been several weeks of fog, November slipping out undercover, miserable, warmish and clammy.

‘Mum…?’

A fan of weak light making an energy-efficient halo around the kid’s head.

Kid. When you woke up and Jane was in the doorway, she was always a little girl again, the blue woolly dog called Ron under an arm and something in the darkness shaking her six-year-old sanity.

Mummy, you won’t die, will you?

Well… not till I’m very old.

From all those years ago, Merrily remembered superstitiously touching the bed’s wooden frame as little Jane came back for the specifics.

How old will you be when you die?

Next day, she’d said happily to Sean, Mummy’s going to die when she’s a hundred and six. And Sean had laughed. Sean who would die a few years later in the wreckage of his car on the motorway, aged thirty-three – same age as Jesus, although that was where the comparisons ended.

‘OK, look…’ Jane wavered in the doorway. ‘I know you’re out early in the morning and everything but if I don’t tell you and then it turns out something bad’s happened…’

Aged nineteen now. A woman. Dear God, how did that happen? Merrily pulled the duvet around her shoulders. There were still times when Jane wouldn’t get a proper night’s sleep if she didn’t take a piece out of yours.

‘It’s the churchyard. Somebody’s in there?’

‘And…?’

Not exactly unusual to find people in the churchyard at night, even in winter. And on a Friday night – men walking home from the pub caught short. Just occasionally, some recently bereaved person who couldn’t sleep, too British to weep publicly in daylight or be seen talking to the dead, in which case…

She scrabbled for the bedside lamp.

‘Mum, no, don’t put another light on, they might—’

‘They?’

‘I heard it, but I couldn’t see much from my window, so I went down to the East Wing?’

Their name for the furthest bedroom, the only one that overlooked a corner of the churchyard. Unused for years; one of them would venture up there every couple of months to bring down the cobwebs.

‘There seems to be a lamp. On the ground or a grave. Not moving anyway, except the light goes in and out, like someone’s walking across it, but that might’ve been the fog. Managed to get the window open, and there was this kind of slapping. Like boots in mud. Suggesting a few of them.’

‘What? Grave robbers?’

‘I was thinking more like a bunch of kids holding a seance or something?’

Merrily sighed. It was not unknown. Also vandalism, gravestones pushed over in a show of drunken strength.

‘What’s the time?’

‘Not sure. Gone midnight. Like I say it could be nothing. Just thought you should know.’

Merrily was feeling for the old grey fleece she’d been wearing instead of a dressing gown, her eyes refocusing. She’d thought Jane was in her bathrobe, but now she saw it was the parka.

‘Have you been out?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Well… don’t.’

Merrily swinging her feet to her slippers on the rag rug, padding over to the wardrobe, reaching inside for her jeans as Jane came hesitantly to the point.

‘I think it’s near Aidan Lloyd’s grave?’

‘Oh.’ Today’s funeral – or maybe yesterday’s by now. ‘How near?’

‘Very near.’

And she’d know. For Jane, it was a grave too far. Aidan Lloyd, killed in a road accident, was their nearest neighbour now, not far over the wall separating the apple trees in the vicarage garden from the apple trees in the churchyard. When they’d first moved here, there’d been more trees and bushes, even an area of mown grass, then new stones had come shouldering in. The dead of Ledwardine were crowding them. Jane didn’t like that.

Merrily followed her down the passage, zipping up the night fleece, stuffing her vape stick into a torn pocket.

They left the passage light on and the door open to see their way into the East Wing with its bare boards and an old bed frame upended against a wall. Merrily pushed the window hard and it flew open with a bang into the cold, curdled night.

‘Sorry,’ Jane said. ‘Should’ve told you I’d only wedged it. Can you…?’

‘I’m not sure.’

Merrily put her head out of the window and the night wrapped itself coarsely, like a soaking lace curtain, around her face. Below her, the trees in the vicarage garden were wrestling in the fog with the churchyard trees over the wall.

And then, through the tangle, she did see it: a gaseous wisp swiftly smothered and then returning, as if from a distant lighthouse.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘Yes.’

And yes, it probably was on or near the newest grave, just a patch of raised turfs awaiting a stone. She withdrew from the night, shut the window.

‘What are you going to do?’ Jane said.

‘Guess I’d better check it out. If I’m not back—’

‘Oh come on! Like I’m letting you go on your own?’

Jane against the feeble light, hands on hips, defiant.

Merrily shrugged.

‘Yeah, all right, but we go quietly until we know what it is.’

‘And then maybe even quieter.’

Too dark to see Jane’s grin, but she heard it.

For days now, even weeks, Jane had been moody, not her normal self. Perhaps a gap year between school and further education wasn’t always a good idea. Without some absorbing work-experience, it could be very flat.

Jane had never liked flat.

Down in the hall, Merrily stepped into her boots, unhooked her waxed jacket and pulled down a scarf.

She was thinking that going out there might not actually be wise. At one time you were expected to police your churchyard, but times had changed quite quickly; not so long since a vicar had been stabbed to death outside his own church. OK, not around here, but a warning had been sounded.

And fog complicated everything. Fog itself was aggressive.

Merrily unbolted the front door but didn’t turn the key. Taking in nicotine, the e-cig glowing green, she exchanged glances with Jesus, still compassionately dangling his lantern in the framed print of Holman-Hunt’s Light of the World, then turned to Jane.

‘Don’t suppose if we were to put a ladder up against the wall at the bottom of the garden…?’

‘Too many trees.’ Jane was locating the zipper on her parka. She looked up. ‘Not that there will be soon if the graveyard goes on expanding. Couple of years’ time we’ll be burying people in our flower beds. Turning the shed into a mausoleum.’

‘Unlikely. The diocese wouldn’t devalue this place. When they get rid of me, they’ll switch the vicarage to a little semi and flog this off to a nice big family from London. Anyway, you’ll be at university soon.’

And might never come back here to live. Who knew? Merrily opened the front door, felt the air. Not as cold as the East Wing, but cold enough.

‘I really didn’t think that corner was part of the graveyard,’ Jane said. ‘How long have they had it?’

‘Since before my time.’

‘So it was just waiting there, getting mowed and weeded by Gomer, just waiting for somebody to die.’

‘They’re an odd family, flower. Wasn’t what you could call a good funeral.’

Aidan Lloyd’s service had been short and muted, not well attended for a farming family. The central aisle had separated the father from the mother and her husband. No conspicuous grief on either side, only a sense of impenetrable negativity which somehow seemed to go deeper than death.

‘Got your phone?’

‘So we can call 101 if necessary?’ Jane patting a pocket of her parka. ‘Then the cops take five minutes to answer and another five to put us through to Hereford? Where someone suggests we call back in the morning.’

‘And it’s switched on?’

‘Yes!’

Jane jerking up her zip.

Merrily pulled on her gloves.

‘Right, then.’

2

Cold air

IT WAS LONG after midnight when they agreed it was finished – the last track on Toxica, the Belladonna album that Lol was producing for Prof Levin’s Thin River label. A complicated final mix, and they cracked it. But the whoopees were premature because Prof then got around to telling Lol the good news and bad news.

Although mostly bad, he said, and even the good wasn’t all that good.

The sliding doors to the studio were shut, sealing them both in with a smell of coffee strong enough to burn your brain. Sunken bulbs in the false ceiling lit the beacon of Prof’s domed skull. He set down a chipped earthenware mug in front of Lol, began to empty coffee into it. Lol held up his hands: no more.

Prof looked at him over his grandad glasses and kept on pouring, coffee splashes scalding Lol’s fingers. He sat down, hands squeezed around his hot mug. Prof was a recovering alcoholic, caffeine his methadone.

‘So I talked to the agency. It might go out for another month. But not, as I’d been led to think, abroad. Too British, Laurence. Too bleedin’ British. Of course, they might decide to play it over something shot in rural Connecticut or somewhere, but…’

‘Doubtful?’

‘Doubtful.’

It always had sounded unlikely. One of those long, narrative commercials, promoting later-life mortgages. A micro-movie, and its soundtrack was Lol’s song ‘Camera Lies’, with all its bucolic whimsy.

Remember this one, the day is dwindling

Down in Powell’s wood, collecting kindling.

With peak-hour screening, Prof had said airily, the music on the ad would probably be making Lol a thousand a day for a while, paying off his mortgage before next summer. But that had been some weeks ago, before transmission. Perhaps, in the meantime, someone had played the song all the way to

Camera lies

She might vaporize

In cold air.

Lol shut his eyes on the myriad LED lights sprinkled around the room like a meteor shower. Not like he hadn’t always been dubious about this bittersweet ditty persuading mature couples to take out new mortgages.

‘So what you’re saying, Prof, is that the expected big earner has, um, vaporized in the commercial cold air of the—’

‘It’ll still make some money, Laurence. Still well worth having. Just no longer life-changing.’

‘And the good news?’

Prof beamed.

‘The good news, from what you tell me, is that you don’t want your life to change. The dream cottage in the dream village with the dream woman, and I believe even the daughter isn’t the nightmare she once was.’

‘That’s it?’

‘Now you no longer have to agonize about swimming pools.’

Prof drank some scalding coffee, clearly glad he’d got that over.

‘Thank you,’ Lol said bleakly.

* * *

Thin River’s farmhouse home in the Frome Valley was most of an hour’s drive from Ledwardine, longer at night, and in darkness and fog… forget it. Thinking he could get back before dawn, Lol had edged down through the powdery air to what had seemed like the side of the lane, before realizing he was standing in the middle of it.

He walked back up the track. At least, in the fog, it was impossible to see the outline of the converted hop kiln where Merrily had gone to perform what had turned out to be an unhappy exorcism. According to Prof, the local people had wanted to demolish the kiln, like the council had with Fred West’s house in Cromwell Street, Gloucester. But it was a listed building. A holiday let now.

Apart from the kiln, the Frome Valley was all good memories for Lol, especially Prof’s granary, where he’d be spending the remaining hours of darkness, in the bed where he’d slept with Merrily on a hot and thundery summer’s night. The first time, neither of them expecting it to happen. An intoxicating scent of cut hay in fields now suffocated by fog. Only days before, he’d written ‘The Cure of Souls’, a sour song about a man’s perceived inability to win the love of a woman priest, his rival the ineffable Big Guy.

Tomorrow he’d have to tell her about the Camera Lies disaster, only weeks after proudly screening it in her bed on his laptop, those misty images of a not-quite-young couple strolling through an autumn wood and a village square with a church.

Here’s a moment on the chancel stair

The candles warm your face and light your hair

Is this the edge of sacrilege?

Do I care?

He might’ve let the tears come if the fog hadn’t parted to reveal Prof waiting for him outside the studio door. He was wearing his ancient navy-surplus duffel coat, the outside bulkhead lamp making his domed head glow like an old gas mantle.

‘I’ve lit the paraffin stove for you, in the granary. The sheets felt a little damp to the touch so give them half an hour.’’

They walked across the yard towards the squat tower with the bleary light in a high window.

‘This is still a base, Laurence. It’s selling albums, selling downloads. Not the way it might’ve done fifteen, twenty years ago, but it’s still a new foundation. To build on. And… I don’t have another album for you to produce right now, but I can get you support gigs, in the spring.’

‘Not the Mumfords.’

‘Not the Mumfords. And don’t knock support. So the sellout audience doesn’t know you, it matters not. You give them ‘Camera Lies’, and it all comes back to them. All those images, the expensive post-production…’

‘From a TV commercial that’s no longer running?’

‘… the crackling leaves, the frost, the candlelight on the chancel stairs. Beautiful. Haunting. The only thing they’ll have forgotten is that it was advertising a fucking bank, and where’s the problem with that?’

‘I can’t do support in the spring,’ Lol said. ‘That’s the problem.’

The stove put blue and pink flushes into the granary’s interior walls of whitewashed rubble stone. It was a good stove, once you got used to the smell.

‘What are you telling me?’ Prof demanded. ‘Early retirement, is that it? Vanishing into your own bucolic commercial?’ On his feet now, finger pointing. ‘Don’t you dare give me that. You spend most of the summer doing chickenshit pubs and village halls with your friend, the farmer with the amplifier stacks in his barn, and you return, telling me you’ve finally overcome your agoraphobia—’

‘It was never agoraphobia,’ Lol said wearily. ‘It isn’t the same as not wanting to leave somewhere you’ve been happier than you thought possible, but you still—’

‘A muddy bleeding field? It’s not Glastonbury. It’s going to be one of a hundred pissy little local festivals that might pull a few hundred punters if it doesn’t rain. It’ll do nothing for you. Take it from an old sound-engineer who still remembers ambition.’

‘It’s all they’ve ever asked from me.’

‘Who?’

‘The village,’ Lol said. ‘Well, Barry, at the Black Swan. His idea. He handles the commercial side, the catering. Me, I persuade good people to play for not a lot of money. So far, it’s Moira Cairns, maybe Sproatly Smith and some others we’re not ready to talk about.’

He stood at the bigger window, by day overlooking the Frome Valley where they grew hops for beer. An hour from Ledwardine which traditionally had produced apples for cider – the Village in the Orchard, home of the muddy field.

Prof sighed.

‘And the vicar – still a street between you?’

‘Close neighbours,’ Lol said.

At night, he could look from his cottage windows across the street to the lights of the vicarage. Some nights, while Jane was away on her gap-year archaeological dig and he had a day off from touring, they would both look across from his bedroom, at no lights.

‘She still doing that stuff like at Stock’s kiln?’ Prof said.

‘With no encouragement at all from the new Bishop of Hereford.’

‘They have a new one?’

‘Craig Innes. Modernizer. Doesn’t like spooky.’

‘Pfft!’ Prof said. ‘Religion. All of it’s spooky. Nature of the beast. Don’t even ask me about Judaism.’

No way round this. Lol told Prof about Innes’s links to a senior faction inside the C of E committed to wiping out what they considered to be medieval practices in the Church. All in the cause of survival in an increasingly secular age. A tougher job in Herefordshire, where the old ways died hard, but he was a determined bastard.

‘If he drops her from deliverance – and he will, soon as he can justify it – she can hardly stay in the diocese. That’s how she sees it anyway, and she might be right.’

Prof sat down on the side of the bed.

‘If she goes… you would have to follow, yes?’

‘I try to think it could be the best thing for both of us.’

Prof’s chuckle was arid.

‘Farewell to the place that gave you sanctuary when you were a lost boy? The place where you didn’t realize you could ever be so happy? Oh yes, I can see the logic in that.’

Lol said nothing. He rubbed at the condensation on the glass. Nothing to see, and no sounds apart from the fizzing of the stove and a slow dripping from the eaves.

‘So, essentially, Laurence, things are coming to a head, and you don’t want to come back from some distant gig to find cases packed.’ Prof’s eyes were sad in the mauve light. ‘Ah, the irony of it. A boy once disowned by his fundamentalist Christian parents for embracing the devil’s music—’

‘Prof, please, let’s not—’

‘—emerging from the darkest period in his life – this is pertinent – with an entirely understandable antipathy to organized religion, only to fall in love with a vicar? Don’t tell me there isn’t a part of you that secretly hopes this business with the Bishop will drive her out of the damn Church once and for all.’

Lol couldn’t find the words to refute this. His hands were cold and wet from the condensation on the window, and he went to warm them at the paraffin stove. Prof stood up.

‘You should’ve told me this earlier, you tosser, instead of going on about your chickenshit folk festival.’

‘What’s worst about this, Prof, is that they’re never what you expect, the clergy. Especially now, with everything collapsing around them. Spirituality’s the first casualty – especially at his level.’

‘Knives out?’

‘Croziers sharpened like hedging hooks.’

‘I would like to suggest that you’re probably exaggerating, but I fear you’re not.’ Prof felt a bedsheet. ‘Not too damp. Listen, you need to decide if you want to marry this woman, you know that?’

‘Known it for a long time.’

‘Or work out what’s important. And, who knows, hey, perhaps it’s music. Perhaps you might even see that, one day. When it’s too late.’

3

Trespass

VILLAGE FOG, RIVER fog, wasn’t like the city fog she’d known as a kid, acrid with diesel fumes, but it wasn’t like candyfloss either. You could get lost in your backyard on a night like this

She felt moisture like cold sweat on her cheeks. Her hands felt damp, as if the vapours had seeped inside her gloves. The year was too old to be autumnal, the lights of Christmas still unplugged. Just dark and damp enough to absorb sadness, so maybe a good month to be buried.

Merrily followed Jane out of the vicarage drive under trees bagged in fog.

Jane said, ‘If this is nothing you’re going to kill me in the morning, aren’t you?’

‘Flower, this is the morning.’

‘Be something to tell the Legion at the Swan tomorrow, at least,’ Jane said.

Merrily drew her woollen scarf over her lower face. Unless this involved illegal activity, she wouldn’t be telling anybody. And you could say too much sometimes, to the clergy.

She’d brought the heavyweight Maglite torch they kept close to the front door. The beam wasn’t brilliant but it was, as Frannie Bliss had said once, better than a baseball bat and less likely to come back on you in court if you wound up using it on somebody. She left it switched off. If they stayed close to the church wall they’d be OK.

‘Mum, why don’t you just call Lol?’

‘Because he’s not at home. His truck’s not there. He’s at Prof Levin’s. Probably decided to stay the night. I wouldn’t like to drive in this. So let’s just, you know, go in there very quietly, just to see. That’s all. We do our best not to be seen, we don’t speak, we definitely don’t challenge anybody until we know what’s happening.’

On the village square, the fake gaslamps had been switched off since midnight. The few buildings you could make out were vague and shapeless like museum exhibits under dust sheets.

‘They say he did a lot of dope,’ Jane whispered, ‘did you hear that?’

‘Who?’

‘Aidan Lloyd?’

‘Who told you that?’

‘Heard it in the shop. You know how people are: if he’d been doing drugs he probably deserved to die. Especially being rich as well.’

‘Yeah, OK, I heard whispers.’

Though obviously not something the family had wanted to discuss. She hadn’t known the Lloyds, only seen their oilseed rape from afar. Aidan’s father, Iestyn, was the man who’d painted Ledwardine yellow. In the process some old woodland had vanished, it was said. Old but not protected, so he’d got away with it.

She turned and found the church wall and held on to it until they reached the lychgate. To their right the tarmac path to the church, to the left the stony old path to the churchyard, the burial ground. The Lloyd family weren’t churchgoers, except for other farmers’ funerals.

‘Someone said his old man found his stash after his death,’ Jane said. ‘He hadn’t known. He would’ve gone ballistic.’

‘You heard that in the shop, too?’

‘Hairdresser’s.’

No big deal these days, cannabis, even in the sticks, but could this partly explain the atmosphere at the funeral? Even worse after they wheeled the coffin out of the church. That pervading mood of restrained hostility, as the day had congealed around them in the churchyard. Aidan’s mother had been half turned away from the open grave. Short hair, white, no hat. Her face compacted into what looked like permanent anger.

But the most persistent image of that funeral had been Iestyn Lloyd standing on the grave’s edge, looking down – Merrily, bent to her open prayer book, the only person who would have heard what he’d whispered.

She was remembering the slightly wary attitude of Aidan’s step brother when he’d arrived at the vicarage with an envelope containing some personal details for the service. Not all that personal, as it turned out. He came through persistent childhood asthma attacks to emerge as a proficient and dedicated farmer.

She’d tried for anecdotes, but the step brother didn’t seem to understand what she was after. Warmth? Humanity? The sense of a valued life? Even trying to picture Aidan, she saw only the hollow eyes and the smudge of a half-grown beard from the photo in the Hereford Times.

‘And then the woman from the gallery in Lucy’s old shop,’ Jane said, ‘she apparently said he was out of his skull when he rode his quad bike out of the field gate. I’m bloody glad they’re going.’

‘The gallery people?’

Aware that Jane was talking to keep it casual, like this was routine.

‘Always felt totally wrong, people like that in Lucy’s shop.’

‘Time to stop talking, I think, flower.’

Moving cautiously into the churchyard, finding the stony path thought to have been the end of an old coffin trail across the fields from outlying farms.

The churchyard was an alien place tonight, isolated in its own dimension, and all you could hear were heavy drips. Headstones were emerging from the fog like tree stumps in a marsh. Like a cartoon haunted graveyard. If there was one thing you learned from working in deliverance it was that the haunted graveyard was mainly for the cartoons but you still caught your breath when the first monolithic Victorian monument emerged like an industrial ghost from the fog.

Jane swung back, choking on a laugh, shrill relief overcoming caution before sliding back against a gravestone.

And then sinking, as if dissolving into the fog.

‘Oh for—!’

‘What’ve you—?’

Merrily went down next to her, a hand on Jane’s arm.

‘Mum, I can’t get up.’ Jane’s voice splintered with shock and then penetrated by agony. ‘Ankle. I’ve turned my bloody ankle on this… something grabbed my foot.’

‘OK. Don’t try to move, just…’ She’d found it. She could feel the thorns through her gloves. Even dead brambles could snare a foot in the dark. ‘Stay… just stay calm, while I…’

‘Look… look…’

And, oh God, there it was in the middle distance, all the distance there was tonight. Like a pale, grounded moon, quick shadows passing across it like old windblown leaves. But there was no wind.

Jane inhaling sharply.

‘You didn’t believe me, did you?’

‘I did believe you, I just…’

Neither of them moving now, dampness wrapping around them, about twenty paces, she was guessing, from where Aidan Lloyd lay amid a compression of noises: grunts, the weight of breathing.

A painful throb in Merrily’s chest as she crouched next to Jane up against the stone. It should be anger. She was responsible for this place. She should stand on the lid of a stone tomb and turn on the Maglite, blast them.

‘Jane…’ Head down close. ‘Phone?’

‘I can’t… get to my pocket.’

Merrily gripped the gravestone, watching the off-white light, going in and out as if it was signalling. It was like Jane had said, shadows moving across it at irregular intervals. When the light broke through again, she saw shadows coalescing and heard a dull but solid and complex impact-noise before the shadows were breaking apart again. A slow blur of shifting humanity and not a word said.

‘What are they doing?’

She was gripping Jane’s arm, pulling her close, Jane’s rapid breaths in her face. They were huddled tight to their grave which, she realized now, by the softness of rampant moss on the stone, was where Lucy Devenish lay, the old soul of the village, whose will had decreed that no growth should be removed from her stone.

Merrily pinched a loop of bramble between finger and thumb, pulling it steadily until she could fit the whole glove inside and wrench it away from Jane’s foot.

‘You’re going to have to try and stand up, flower. Can you do that?’

‘Not sure.’

‘Try.’

Merrily wedged herself against Lucy’s furry stone with its lines from Traherne: No more shall clouds eclipse my treasures/Nor viler shades obscure my highest pleasures. Running the lines through her mind like a mantra, but Lucy couldn’t help them now. At the end of a tunnel in the fog, the lamplight flared and then went out and stayed out, but the shifting sounds continued, and then there was a metallic chuckle.

Jane, incredibly, was trembling. Merrily switched on the torch, shading it with a gloved hand, though there was no need; its light was bleary, lukewarm, batteries so expensive now that you eked them out. The torch licked feebly at Lucy’s stone like it didn’t want to go any further.

Merrily froze. Really froze, as if her heart had stopped.

It was not a shiver. Nothing so pleasurable. It was like becoming aware that you were wearing a cold coat which was not yours and carried its history in every frigid fold.

In a moment of separation, she knew that another step would be trespass, and she was switching off the torch just as the fog shredded momentarily like rotting muslin, exposing the bony old apple trees and men like dark hawks under tall hats, moving like the figures on a Victorian automaton, closing sluggishly together and then parting to expose in grey light the suggestion of a face that she didn’t want to believe was a face. Trespass. That urgent sense of being so close to trespass. The unquestionable need to flee.

4

No visible light

SHE’D AWOKEN THE kitchen woodstove, feeding it brittle twigs before pushing the Victorian sofa in from the scullery for Jane, helping her on to it, between plumped-up cushions. Jane scowling, the stove glass flaring yellow as the twigs caught.

‘I can walk. I got back OK.’

She’d got back, but not OK. Hobbling together, arms around one another like the three-legged race at some old school sports-day.

Merrily added a little brandy to Jane’s tea.

‘I think you can stay there for a bit.’

‘You going to call the cops?’

‘I’ve not decided.’

They’d stumbled into the house, door banged, locked, bolts thrown. And all this meant nothing.

‘If you’re thinking of going back…’ Jane lowering a foot to the floor. ‘… then we’re both—’ The foot had touched a stone flag. ‘Oh sh—’

Bravado. It didn’t need spelling out: Jane did not want to go back. Merrily helped her back on to the sofa then went across to the Welsh dresser and found some squat batteries in a top drawer. Dropped them one by one into the torch.

‘Your hand’s shaking,’ Jane said.

Merrily tried the torch. Strong white light. She did up the poppers on her jacket.

‘Mum, listen, I really hate to sound like… like your mother, or something. But you can’t go back there on your own.’

‘I’m not going all the way back. Just close enough to—’

‘Call the bloody cops. When even I’m saying that…’

‘I can’t…’ She couldn’t say that she was only not going back to the churchyard because she was afraid. ‘I can’t even begin to think what I’d say to the police when I can’t explain it to myself.’

Jane’s eyes were clouded with uncertainty.

‘We’re not kids. We’re not from some primitive society. We don’t run away from things.’

‘We couldn’t run, could we?’

Merrily went down on her knees next to the stove, opening it up and feeding it a flaky, dry log.

‘All my fault,’ Jane said.

‘Could’ve happened to either of us in those conditions. We did what you do when you’re incapable of challenging anybody.’

‘And that’s all it was?’

No, of course it wasn’t.

Ethel pattered in and jumped on the sofa next to Jane, who sat up, defiantly, hugging the cat.

‘It’s not a broken ankle, it’s not even a proper sprain. Just give me a few more minutes…’

She reached her spare hand down to the twisted ankle, as if she was about to prove something, then stifled a sob, lay back, defeated, Ethel scrambling free.

Jane looked up, her smile a little crooked.

‘Obvious why you won’t call the police.’

Merrily stood up.

‘Oh?’

‘Because you can’t have anything getting back to the Bishop. Anything he could use as evidence of your… precarious mental state.’

‘Jane, that’s—’

‘He’s turning your whole life into some narrow little path through a minefield. And in your job, you aren’t even allowed to secretly hope he dies or something.’

‘You’d be surprised.’

Jane tried to laugh, didn’t get there.

‘Can we at least talk about this? Like, what if… How did you know it was real?’

‘Jane—’

‘It didn’t look real, did it? They did not look real. At the very least, it was like we’d walked into a play. Street theatre. Graveyard theatre. Or something that… wasn’t there.’

‘They were real. You know that or you wouldn’t be suggesting I call the police.’

She didn’t want to talk about this. Not now. Not the withdrawal of protection, the moment of isolation, the impossibility of prayer. It was not Jane’s fault, it was her fault for not responding to the signals. For coming so close to trespass, her hand almost extended to grasp something… fibrous. She’d been here before.

She went to the kitchen window, stared at her own dull reflection, hair all over the place, eyes retracted into shadows. She didn’t want to ask Jane what she’d seen. Or what she’d felt – especially that. But then the little voice was back, the how old will you be when you die? voice.

‘Then why was I so frightened?’

‘Because you were helpless.’ She turned away from the window, went to kneel down by the Victoria sofa. ‘And in pain.’

Jane looked down into clasped hands.

‘I am… not like you.’

‘No. Of course not.’

‘Still a bit of a pagan.’

‘It’s your choice.’

‘Because… because it’s interesting. It’s exciting. It brings the world alive for me – the fact that there are things out there, in nature, that we don’t understand. It’s bigger than the sad little politicians. Bigger than getting rich and having lots of clothes.’

‘Maybe.’

‘So why…’ Jane looked up, tears in shocking dark, parallel lines down her cheeks. ‘So why was I afraid? In my own village?’

Merrily sighed, gripping Jane’s hand.

‘If I knew that I’d sort it for you. Me and my mate, God. Look… it could be something stupid. Could be something we’ll be laughing about. But equally…’

‘You’re avoiding the issue.’

‘Yeah. Maybe I am. I’m sorry. It’s my place, too.’

‘If I could walk,’ Jane said, ‘I’d be up in the East Wing, now, and looking out of the window? Now we know what we’ve seen, it might just… I don’t know.’

Why not? A small reprieve.

‘OK.’

‘Leave the torch, so I know you won’t go sneaking out.’

‘Oh, Jane…’

She put the torch on the dresser and went out through the hall to the stairs, leaving the lights off. As soon as she was in darkness, the images came back, jittering about to the fractured rhythm of their struggle home. The images were with her as she ran up the stairs, and down the landing, past closed door after closed door, then two steps down into the short landing with one door at its end.

She stumbled into the East Wing and leaned on the metal window frame until it scraped open with a thin screech and she was hanging out into the grey-green night, opening her eyes to shadows intermingling in the fog beyond the garden wall.

The pictures came up in her head again like some scratched old black and white movie: surreal light and shadow, men like predatory birds and the face that she hoped had not been a face.

She looked down.

Bare old apple trees, that was all.

No lamp. No visible light.

Nothing.

Dear God, maybe she could just wake up. She hung out there in space, staring into the dense night, contempt for herself dampening the residual fear.

She should have asked Aidan Lloyd’s father what he’d meant, standing on the graveside green baize in his long overcoat, looking down. That harsh whisper. The words she still didn’t quite believe he’d said.

Devil took him.

The air thickening around Iestyn Lloyd, a narrow man with a grey moustache and a felt hat, the sun shrinking behind him until it looked like a blood blister.

Part Two

The sheer otherness of the display entranced him – it seemed to appear from the darkest, least conspicuous corners of English provincial life, and to be innately understood by the people who practised it.

Rob YoungElectric Eden (Faber, 2010)

5

No justice

FROM HIS OFFICE window, Bliss shared his breakfast with Sonia the seagull and watched the city manifesting out of the fog, nothing high-rise to hide the hills, the only visible towers attached to churches, still misty-pale.

Almost serene, like the council hadn’t been developing Hereford, hadn’t taken the cattle market out of town, replacing it with a concrete canyon accommodating chain stores and a cinema. A big cinema with drab grey walls like the Bastille, brutalizing the entrance to the city centre. Apparently, this was where the new police HQ would be, when they eventually left Gaol Street, somewhere behind the Bastille.

Somewhere Rich Ford, the uniformed inspector, would never work.

‘Been thinking where we could move to, me and the wife, when I’m out of here,’ Rich said. ‘Little barn conversion maybe, over towards the Black Mountains, from where all you ever need see of the city is the distant fireworks on New Year’s Eve.’

He’d be gone soon after new year. Couldn’t come soon enough, he kept saying that.

‘Actually, I hear parts of Eastern Europe are very desirable now,’ Bliss said. ‘Lovely scenery. Clean, unspoiled towns with terrific cathedrals. Friendly people. Very little crime.’

‘Yes, very amusing, Francis.’

Bliss yawned.

‘You said something about quad bikes?’

‘Easy to move around, easy to dispose of. Always a ready market for quad bikes.’

‘You know what, Rich?’ Bliss said. ‘I’m bored already.’

Seemed a couple of uniforms had found a selection of these farmers’ toys in the back of a vehicle-repairer and dealer’s premises out on the Rotherwas industrial estate. Jag’s Motors, owned by one Wictor Jaglowski, about whom there’d been rumours. His brother, who had a half share in a Polish deli, was doing time for big-time ciggie-smuggling.

‘It gets more interesting, Francis,’ Rich said. ‘Least, that’s what my instincts are telling me. Actually, quad bikes come into the story again. Or one, anyway. Not that you’d get much for that, except from a scrapyard.’

Bliss stared at him, putting it together.

‘This is the one on which the farm guy died?’

‘That’s why we went down the Rotherwas. The feller who ran into him worked for Jaglowski. Sort of.’

Bliss sat down behind his desk. ‘Take me through it again, Rich.’

He always felt bad about it, but links with a death, even accidental, added a certain texture to a case.

A lot of new drivers on the roads of Herefordshire, and not all of them had a British licence. Including Lukas Babekis – and that probably wasn’t his real name either.

Lukas was twenty years old and Lithuanian. He’d been people-smuggled, one of a bunch of Lithies secretly accommodated on a caravan site over towards the border with Worcestershire. All young lads, working their passage. Euphemism for slavery.

‘He got lost while making a delivery for one of those cut-price couriers that employ freelance drivers with their own vehicles,’ Rich said. ‘Jaglowski was one of their operatives – fingers in more pies than the Pukka production line. He’d sub contracted Lukas, providing the van. Well, I say sub contracted…’

‘He wasn’t paying him.’

‘I think he got free sarnies from Morrisons. Anyway… country lane, part of that network south of Leominster connecting villages nobody ever goes to. Very few signposts. So Lukas has lost his way in this maze of little lanes. No other vehicles in the vicinity, no witnesses.’

‘Remind me about the victim.’

‘Farm bloke. Farmer’s son. Coming out of field gate on his quad bike. Off-white van comes whizzing round the corner, smack. His face was mush.’

Bliss winced.

‘Not much chance on a quad bike, have you?’

‘One reason we don’t like them on the Queen’s highways.’

‘I’m not entirely sure of the rules, Rich. Are they ever allowed on a public road?’

‘Only if taxed, insured and registered with the DVLA, number plates front and rear. Mr Lloyd’s vehicle met none of these requirements. All right, he was only crossing from a field on one side to a field on the other, probably done it thousands of times. He bears a percentage of the blame. Or would if he was still with us.’

‘But?’

‘Lukas was obviously travelling too fast for a single track road he admitted he’d never been on before. Being as how he was not long over from Lithuania. Admitted going too fast for the conditions – two other deliveries and he was late. Kept bursting into tears. Said it was all his fault and he never wanted to drive again. Clearly unaware that unregistered, uninsured quad bikes are not supposed to be on the road. The duty solicitor, however, was.’

‘Would’ve got him off, you reckon?’

‘Not impossible, though he was obviously scared he might be looking at a gaol sentence.’

‘Vanished?’

‘Probably back with his mum in Lithuania by now. Until then, we didn’t know he was an illegal. Jaglowski says he’s furious. But the boy had papers! Who can you trust these days?’

‘So Mr Jag, it was his van, right?’

‘Jag has three or four, available for hire or his own contract work. We’d finished with the van that killed the farmer, and when he didn’t show up to collect it, it seemed like a good excuse for an unscheduled visit. Jag was out, only a boy in charge. Opportunity for a little wander around in the back of the garage, where we clocked a variety of agricultural implements – three quads, collection of chainsaws, heavy duty hedge-trimmers, brush-cutters and the like.’

‘Jag’s fencing stolen kit.’

‘Well, yeah, but I’m thinking more than that. You know how many farm thefts there’ve been in the county this year?’

‘I know how many the bloody farmers say there’ve been.’

Big issue again this year. Another useful campaign for Countryside Defiance, the pro-hunting pressure group posing as a general rural-interests lobby.

‘You know what I’m thinking, Francis? Wictor Jaglowski with his little fleet of vans?’

‘Let me process it.’ Bliss leaning his chair back against the window. Sonia had left the building. ‘Fellers like this Lukas, out ostensibly on courier work, in plain vans, happening to get themselves lost…’

‘I reckon Jag’s sending blokes out into the sticks to have a discreet poke around, try a few shed doors, unlocked trucks, Land Rovers. Anything not padlocked to the wall goes into the back of the off-white van. And then he comes back for the Land Rovers.’

Bliss nodded. Made sense.

‘Or even the odd sheep,’ Rich said.

‘Anything found in the back of the van after the fatality?’

‘Nothing. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t get rid when he knew he was in trouble.’

‘We know any more drivers going out in Jag’s vans?’

‘Shouldn’t be too hard to find them. Think of the brownie points with the farmers.’

‘We never get brownie points from farmers, Rich, nobody does. Still… thanks for this. I’ll ask Ma’am if we can extend to an obbo. See how far up it goes. And then, if Jag’s part of something more extensive, we can offload it on the NCA.’

Might be another layer of cop-bureaucracy, but the one good thing about the National Crime Agency was the way it saved you having to deal with foreign police and spend money on interpreters.

Rich nodded.

‘Am I right in thinking you and the DCI are getting on better these days, Francis?’

‘Well, you know, Rich…’ Bliss carried on making a note on his pad. ‘I find sleeping together a couple of nights a week makes for a much easier working relationship.’

Pause for laughter. They both knew that at least half of Gaol Street was convinced Annie was gay.

‘Anyway,’ Rich said, ‘she en’t gonner be around for much longer if her old man gets the big one next year.’

Bliss said nothing. Still hoping Charlie Howe would see the madness here and pull out of the contest for Police and Crime Commissioner. Or the government would have a rethink, scrap the commissioners and bring back the old police authorities which hadn’t been up to much but at least there’d been a semblance of democracy.

‘Somebody was saying,’ Rich said, ‘that his early manifesto’s in today’s Hereford Times.’

‘Already?’

‘He don’t let the grass grow, Charlie. And he’ll win. He always does. I’ve sent out for a copy.’

‘He’s bent, Rich. He was a bent copper, a bent councillor and the chances of him not being a bent police commissioner…’

Rich smiled down at his boots.

‘Must’ve known four or five bent coppers in my time. I mean real bent, not just mavericks, real corrupt, free holidays at some old scrote’s villa on the Costa-whatever. And you know one thing they all had in common, Francis? They were popular. In the job and out of it. Every bloody one of them.’

Bliss sighed.

‘Jack the lad.’

‘Whereas Annie Howe… dead straight. Painfully straight. In that way, at least.’

‘And nobody likes her.’

‘No justice, Francis,’ Rich said.

6

Many of us

NOT QUITE TEN a.m., but it could have been dusk. It was faintly raining, but the village was still wearing the thinning fog like a dirty mac when Merrily came hurrying out of the churchyard, under the lychgate and on to the square.

Much relieved to spot the Animal, Lol’s blue truck, at the end of the cobbles – no sign of it when she’d gone down to the churchyard – but there was no time to knock on his door or even run back to the vicarage to see Jane. The lanterns were on either side of the Swan’s main door and there was Clive Wells at the top of the steps, at least half an hour early.

Languid Clive, old money and increasingly High Church – an incense swinger, in the face of what he saw as a corporate Canterbury cosying up to the secular society. Looking much the same as he had when they’d first met at Huw Owen’s chapel in the Beacons to be initiated into the dark arts.

They hugged but then he held her at arm’s length, peering at her, curious. Clearly, she didn’t look so good, with the cursory make-up, hair a mess.

‘Jane,’ she said. ‘Twisted an ankle. I’ve been… rushing around a bit.’

‘Anything I can do?’

‘No, no, she’s…’

Much better, actually. Tentatively walking around the kitchen, saying, I’m fine, go, go, check it out or you won’t have time.

Clive Wells followed her into the Swan, past the main bar to the polished oak door of the Jacobean lounge with a little sign on it that said tamely,

ANGLICAN ADVISORY GROUP

‘You wimped out, then,’ Clive said.

‘Too right, I did.’

Officially they didn’t even have a name. The Legion – that was someone’s idea of a black joke. My name is Legion – there are so many of us, the demon tells Jesus through the possessed man in Mark, chapter 5. Merrily blaming herself for being dumb enough to ask if anyone knew the collective noun for a group of exorcists.

Not that there were so many of them around the Welsh border, which was why they’d extended the catchment area. It had been generally agreed that meeting twice a year was not a bad idea in these difficult times. Swap stories, discuss methods, slag off bishops. The first meeting had been up in Wrexham, this was the second.

Merrily and Clive went through into the long room with the dark oak panelling and wrought-iron hanging lights and a conference table with twenty chairs.

‘Business brisk?’ Merrily said.

‘Strains credibility sometimes, I’m afraid. Or I’m entering my midlife crisis. Had a black-eyed kids situation a few weeks ago. People read about them in the tabloids and before you know it…’

Sometimes you thought you were losing touch with reality when it was just a question of allowing reality to expand, but black-eyed kids were outside the most flexible parameters. Merrily remembered the front-page splash Jane had spotted on Jim Prosser’s newspaper rack. It had seemed less like evidence of a thinning of the veil between worlds as a narrowing of the gap between the Daily Star and the Daily Sport.

‘First heard of, apparently, in the 1990s,’ Clive said. ‘Began in America. Combination of spectral dwarf and the traditional Roswell alien, with those large black eyes. People were claiming to have had encounters with what looked at first like ordinary children in hoodies. Except that witnesses spoke of feeling an inexplicable terror before even noticing that the kid’s eyes were like chips of coal. Quite often, after an encounter, bad luck would befall the victim.’

‘You had one in Gloucester?’

‘Two. Knocking on doors. They’d have their backs to the door when the people answered the bells and then they’d turn around slowly. Bleeeargh!’

‘They disappear, or just run off giggling?’

‘In both cases, the householders were so horrified they just slammed their doors and didn’t open them again.’

‘What did you do?’

‘Blessed the doorsteps, sprinkle of holy water. Far from satisfied that these weren’t real kids who’d read the tabloids, but what can you do? Who else but us would do anything?’

How much earth did a coffin displace? The refitted turf on Aidan Lloyd’s grave was substantially higher than the grass around it. It would sink eventually. Might be months before a memorial stone was in place. Jane moved carefully around the grave in the cold-steam air, and then as far as she could go on the other side before the burial area met the bare, bony, apple trees. Rain was gradually drowning the fog, but her mouth was dry, as she bent to examine the ground on the dark side of the grave, and…

… nothing. No obvious footprints on any side. It was like nothing had happened here since Gomer Parry had filled in the grave after the mourners had left.

This wasn’t possible. Had Mum seen this? Jane straightened up unsteadily, flinging back the hood of her parka, tilting her head to let the rain sting her face. Wake me up, for God’s sake. A blurring of her senses, like something was in the process of erasing last night, turfing over the memories.

She recalled being helped up to bed, her ankle splattered by Mum with analgesic gel and bound up in a support bandage. Expecting nightmares, pathetically wishing Eirion were there with her. Eirion who, unsurprisingly, had stopped phoning. Maybe he knew something. Maybe somebody had told him about Sam.

No memory of dreaming at all. In the morning light, she’d edged slowly down the stairs to find Mum on the phone to Barry at the Swan, checking the arrangements for today. Examining Jane’s ankle before swallowing tea and dashing out, dragging her coat and bag behind her. Jane, look, I need to check the churchyard. I’ll call you. Don’t do anything, OK? Don’t speak to anybody about what happened. Toaster’s on.

Jane had had honey and toast and rubbed more gel into her ankle, moving round and round the kitchen until she could walk with both feet. It was OK, more or less, just a question of taking your time. Mum had duly called from her mobile to say there was nothing to see in the churchyard. Really, nothing.

They had to have missed something.

Jane turned slowly at the sound of a cracking twig, drew a tight breath. There’d been nothing behind her but fog; now there was the huge, numinous imprint of the church emerging, with shimmering grandeur, from the thinning curtain. As if it was advancing on her. She felt momentarily afraid. Vulnerable. A sensation she didn’t remember at all from being a kid. Not even when Dad was killed. Another aspect of becoming adult: learning to embrace fear because there was nowhere to run. No one to save you from yourself and your wrong decisions. Decisions made too fast because you thought you had to.

She’d bought some time, but it was running out. The gap year nearly half gone and nothing from it, this limbo state between school and college, supposedly a time to discover herself. A freedom that wasn’t freedom at all. Ought to be applying to universities now, for next year, citing her work experience, her passion for archaeology. But why? Why? Archaeologists were ten a penny and nobody wanted to pay them.

She’d got talking to this supermarket manager in Hereford with a second in English Literature. Asked him if he couldn’t get a job as a college teacher, and he’d said he’d rather be a supermarket manager.

The mossy shoulders of Lucy’s stone felt warm under Jane’s hands. Above the quote from Traherne, the stone said,

LUCY DEVENISHof this village

No dates, as requested in Lucy’s will – was that allowed?

As if she was not dead but still here, still functioning in some way. A witch in the oldest sense. Talk to me, Lucy. You saw them. You know what they were.

He was built like an old-fashioned wrestler, short and thick set, shaven-headed, overweight. He came creaking out of the leather-backed chair at the end of the conference table.

‘At this point, I’d just like to ask, what do we think we’re doing? Do we even know?’

There are so many of us. No more than a dozen, actually. Men and women from the coalface, some old mates, some new to the ministry, a couple whose names Merrily struggled to remember and this guy who she didn’t know at all.

At first, she’d had him down as aggressively evangelical – the only one of them wearing a white dog collar at a jeans-and-trainers event – but maybe not. Accent too plummy. While the others were having coffee a short time ago, he’d bought himself a large glass of red wine.

‘I’ll be honest,’ he said. ‘I rather think I might be having a crisis.’

‘Crisis of faith?’ Clive Wells said.

‘Certainly not that,’ the wrestler said. ‘Because I’ve realized that the deliverance ministry is anti-faith.’

Oh please…

Merrily was sitting next to Clive Wells who she’d persuaded to chair the gathering. Clive twitched a tired smile.

‘Go on then, Paul. Explain.’

‘Anti-faith,’ the wrestler said, ‘in that it has us hunting for evidence of the miraculous. For example, we deal with people who think their houses are haunted, and we – some of us – feel the need to become psychic investigators, as distinct from priests.’

Nick Cowan sat up. Nick the former social worker, now senior deliverance minister for Worcester, who had opened the morning session by making a thin case for the survival of exorcism at a time of dwindling congregations on the basis that people always came back to the Church when troubled by the unknown.

Merrily hadn’t liked to mention the proliferation of paranormal-rescue groups with their digital recorders, magnetometers, resident mediums and baseball caps on back to front. Showing you digital pictures of your orbs, playing you EVP messages of your entity croaking through analogue radio static.

‘Times change,’ Nick Cowan said. ‘People are more widely read on the paranormal and related issues. They’ve seen TV programmes, films, they expect more than a blessing and a pat on the head. They expect an explanation.’

‘So we make one up for them?’

The wrestler leaned back behind folded arms, telling them how he’d been invited into deliverance by his bishop because of his experiences abroad with Oxfam and Amnesty International. This was around the time African kids were undergoing wholesale exorcism in parts of London, and there were hints of it in the Midlands.

‘In areas of malnutrition and rudimentary schooling, evil spirits are very much part of the package. But even in Africa, I never encountered a child who seemed possessed by anything more than the earthly evils of deprivation, shortage of healthcare, poor schooling and parental apathy. Never encountered anything that I didn’t believe couldn’t be turned around through a combination of sympathy, prayer—’

‘And foreign aid. Yes,’ Clive Wells said. ‘Paul, given that the policy generally adopted by Bishops for the appointment of exorcists would include, amongst its criteria, a level of scepticism—’

‘Not about the nature of God, Clive, don’t accuse me of that. I’m merely questioning the way we interpret people’s ghost stories.’

‘None of these issues are simple.’

‘Or are we perhaps overcomplicating them? Which, I have to say, leads me to question the kind of clergy who allow themselves to be recruited for deliverance training.’

Merrily slid Clive Wells a note on the back of a menu. This Paul – who is he?

‘So what would you do?’ Nick Cowan said. ‘What would you do if faced with a mother who’s convinced her child is possessed by a satanic evil you don’t really accept? Or, indeed, what have you done in that situation?’

The wrestler beamed savagely.

‘Whatever it might be – delusion, psychosis or, indeed, alleged satanic evil – I throw the book at it. Certainly wouldn’t waste my time turning detective. Just as I might not see it as my job to investigate the history of a so-called haunted house to try to give the alleged spirit an identity. Is the house built on the site of a pagan cemetery or something? Who cares? I don’t want to get to know it, whatever it is, or find out what it’s after, or why it might be unquiet… if it’s some former resident who doesn’t like the new decor. Because none of that can ever be proven and – in case anyone’s forgotten – the Bible forbids us from having dealings with the dead. Does anyone want to take issue with me here? Anybody?’

He looked from face to face. Merrily thought his gaze lingered on hers, but maybe that was insecurity. Clive Wells was looking wary now.

‘So what do you do, Paul?’

‘I’ve told you. Leave it to the Holy Spirit. We don’t exorcize, God does, at our request. As we have no means of understanding what’s actually happening, we should regard it all as potentially evil – at least, in the sense that it could be opening doors to mental illness.’

‘So you wouldn’t follow the suggested procedure, beginning with, say, a house blessing?’

‘I’d cut to the chase. Whatever I’m told has been experienced, be it a ball of light or a fragrant perfume, it is an intrusion. Or an imagined intrusion. I say a prayer, then tend to command whatever it is, in the name of Our Lord, to get the hell out.’

‘Although you don’t necessarily believe – yourself – in whatever it is you’re supposed to be dealing with?’