Friends of the Dusk E-Book

Phil Rickman

• Herausgeber: Corvus
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

The discovery of centuries old human bones; a haunted 12th century house; a medieval legend spawning a modern cult... Merrily must piece together a most insidious mystery. 'No-one in the business deals with the spooky stuff better.' - Crime Review UK 'She dragged herself back up, holding her scraped hands inside the sleeves of her parka like paws. As she came to her knees, a sound like laughter was chopped up by the wind, and the woman was back . . .' A legend of the undead, still seductive, still deadly. A storm unearths a medieval corpse in the old city of Hereford, and the past returns to menace diocesan exorcist Merrily Watkins.

Leseprobe

Contents

Part One

1 Touch the darkness

2 A date with Hurricane Lorna

3 Hallowe’en. Normal, irrational anxieties

4 Win-win

5 … or treat

6 Nightlife

7 Not one of ours

8 Lawful and justified

9 Overpowering

10 Trashy world

11 Purple haze

12 Cutting edge

13 Big voice

14 Bridgework

15 A sense of betrayal

16 Claw

17 Get over it

Part Two

18 A war

19 Hicksville

20 Work in progress

21 Bad guy

22 Believe it happened

23 Seedbed

24 Appropriate adult

25 Agony

26 Good-looking kid situation

27 Cunning

28 Smashed faces

29 Rambling in the night

Part Three

30 Dark Net stuff

31 Unsaid

32 Foetal

33 Homework

34 Full broadcast quality

35 Cold case

36 More

37 Coffin wood

Part Four

38 FOTD

39 The Summoner

40 Going out normal

41 The Hereford Issue

42 Swallow the pill

43 Get rid

44 Walks by night

45 Courting the goddess

46 Bloodline

47 At peace

48 Kingsize

49 Before he was mad

50 What can haunt you

51 Just the one

52 The song with the big cigar

53 Only the start

Part Five

54 A peg

55 Grim visitor

56 Blame

57 A fence

58 Timeless beauty

59 Pulse

60 What to believe

61 The cloaked

62 A flogging

63 Darker glasses

64 The Second Death

65 Boyfriend

66 Hereford Gothic

67 Invitation

68 The door

Notes and closing credits

Part One

I was much disturbed by the unhealthy and near-hysterical publicity given by the national press to the question of exorcisms in the Church of England. I was also disturbed by the number of requests for help and advice about the exorcizing of places or persons which I was receiving…

The general attitude in the Church of England seemed to be to regard exorcism as an exercise in white magic or a survival of medieval superstition.

The findings of a commission convened by the Right Reverend Robert Mortimer, Bishop of Exeter. ‘Exorcism’ (SPCK, 1972)

Castle Green is the hidden gem of Hereford. To find it, behind the streetscape and beyond the Cathedral, it has to be stalked…

David Whitehead, The Castle Green at Hereford, a Landscape of Ritual, Royalty and Recreation. (Logaston Press, 2007)

1

Touch the darkness

WAS IT REALLY a good thing visiting the old woman ahead of a much-foreboded late-October storm?

Was it, in fact, a good thing to be visiting her at all?

The room at The Glades, a Victorian greystone home for the elderly, had expanded into a whole suite after the deaths – eerily timely – of Anthea White’s immediate neighbours on the second landing. Two new doorways had been made in the partition walls. Miss White had paid for all this from a recent bequest. She could have bought herself a nice, period cottage down in Hay, but she claimed The Glades suited her lifestyle.

The new living room had floor-to-ceiling bookcases and a view of the bell tower of Hardwicke Church. Miss White was curled into her wide, multi-cushioned swivel chair, a black widow spider biding its time. Were people who’d recently had hip surgery supposed to sit like that?

‘Oh, now, you’ll never believe this, Watkins…’ The old girl leaning forward. ‘… Cardelow’s woman was apparently refusing to dust the books.’

‘Actually,’ Merrily said from the piano stool – no piano, just the stool, ‘I think I would believe it. Especially if you were sitting there watching her. Even with her back turned, the malevolence would be palpable.’

Miss White smiled modestly. Mrs Cardelow, proprietor of The Glades, had brought them tea and cakes herself, asking Merrily if she’d mind bringing back the tray when she came down. Save my legs, Mrs Cardelow had said wearily. And possibly a little of my sanity.

‘Cardelow’s daughter was married the other weekend, did I tell you?’ Miss White said in her tiny, kitteny voice. ‘Some awful junior canon at the Cathedral.’

‘Really? What’s his name?’

‘Didn’t ask. Couldn’t be arsed, but I expect you’ll know him by his receding chin. All change, I hear, at the dicky heart of the Hereford Diocese.’

‘Just a new bishop.’

‘Is he charismatic, like the delicious Hunter?’

‘I hope not, with all my heart; I haven’t met him yet. Next week, apparently.’

Merrily became aware of an oak side table to the left of Miss White’s chair, a white mat on top holding something covered with a black velvet cloth, like a very small catafalque. Miss White peered at Merrily, eyes darker than the caked mascara.

‘Why are you here, Watkins?’

A trapped, tawny leaf flapped irritably outside the window. Merrily shrugged.

‘Just passing.’

‘Bollocks!’

‘I was on the way back from Hay, where I visit the Thorogoods occasionally, and I, erm… thought I’d drop in and, you know, see if you were still breathing?’

Miss White scowled.

‘Don’t trivialize breathing. I enjoy my breathing, in all its infinite varieties. Along with occasional astral tourism, it’s all I have left.’

Merrily smiled. OK, she’d called in because Betty Thorogood had said the word in the bookshop was that Miss White was not well. At her age, often a euphemism for may not see the weekend. She’d been surprised at how hard this had hit her. Exchanging banter with Miss White had become almost like a spiritual exercise, a test of faith. Reaching out a hand to touch the darkness just to prove you could still draw it back.

She glanced at the nearest shelves where a whole row of books had the name Crowley on the spine.

‘And it’s Hallowe’en next week, of course. Your official birthday, Anthea.’

Moments of quiet. The leaf escaped from the window and fluttered away like a timid soul. Miss White was leaning lazily back into her nest of cushions. She might be dying, but it didn’t look imminent.

‘And are things going well for you?’

‘Things are fine. My daughter, Jane, she’s due back from her gap-year archaeological dig in a week or so. Sooner than expected, but I’m quite glad.’

‘And Robinson?’

‘Lol is also finally coming home. Been touring all summer, for the first time in years, then he was asked to do some studio work. Good for his self-esteem.’

Miss White pondered this.

‘He’s never been frightened of me. Odd, that.’

‘Unlike me, huh?’

‘I love the way you come here simply because you are frightened.’

‘Oh, come—’

Merrily leaned back then had to steady herself on the piano stool. Miss White raised her eyes

‘Come on, then, little clergyperson. Out with it. Don’t be annoying.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Thinking of packing it in, are we?’

‘What?’

‘Snipping off the dog collar? Depositing the cassock in the Oxfam bank in the vain hope it might reach some impoverished African priestess?’

The old woman seemed to be rearing in her chair, without moving; she could play tricks with your head. Wasn’t bloody dying at all, was she? Merrily coughed.

‘Makes you ask that?’

Miss White was smiling sweetly again, bending to the tray on the Victorian Gothic table between them to pour more tea. Then she stopped, looking up.

‘Oh, but I never thought…’

Putting down the teapot and leaning back to the side table, she pulled away the black velvet cloth to reveal a small, rectangular cardboard box, with gold sides. On the top, it said:

Ordo Templi Orientis Thoth Tarot Cards

Merrily had seen the pack before. Exquisitely painted by Lady Frieda Harris, designed by A. Crowley.

‘Would you like me to read for you, Watkins?’

The window rattled, and the first raindrops plopped on the glass. The impending high winds were supposed to be the residue of some Atlantic hurricane with a pretty name.

‘No, I would not,’ Merrily said.

2

A date with Hurricane Lorna

DRIVING BACK TO Hereford from Annie’s place, his mood as crazy as the night, Bliss got pulled over by the cops four miles short of the city.

Bugger.

Brakes on as the traffic car’s headlights turned near-horizontal rain into tracer fire, he lowered the glass minimally, sat and waited, engine running. The road was a causeway through a war zone of waterlogged fields. No lights in the farmhouses.

‘… assuming, sir, that you didn’t see the sign back there?’

This big, sarky face swimming up in the side window, all pink and runny like the inside of a freshly sliced tomato: Darryl Mills, ex-CID, gone back into uniform for a more exciting life in a powerful car. Bliss cut his engine, leaned back out of the spray.

‘You know, Darryl, I don’t believe I did. Maybe it got blown away?’

‘One second.’ Up came the flashlight to confirm that Bliss’s face matched the only Scouse accent in Gaol Street. ‘Ah. Sorry, boss.’

‘If you want a whiff of me breath,’ Bliss said wearily, ‘you’ll have to hop in the other side. Buggered if I’m gerrin out in this.’

‘Only the sign you missed, look, that was a diversion.’

‘Darryl, this is Herefordshire, where they leave the friggin’ flood signs up in a drought.’

Darryl Mills shrugged his sodden shoulders.

‘Just telling you, boss. Road’s well blocked up ahead. Trees down everywhere.’

A blast of weather had Darryl hanging on to the wing mirror to stay on his feet, his partner billowing up behind him, waterproofs flapping: Big Patti Calder, mother of four.

‘If you’re going into town, Frannie, it’s gonna take you a while. Five B-roads closed. A49 north of Ross. Flash flood at Letton. Might be more, all we know. Rough ole night.’

‘Bastard of a night,’ Bliss said.

In all kinds of ways. The last thing he’d planned was a date with Hurricane Lorna. His day off. He should be warm and dry at Annie’s flat in Malvern. And would be if her old man hadn’t rung around teatime to check she was at home – Charlie thinking he’d drop in for a coffee on his way back from some meeting in Worcester. Bliss getting the gist and throwing his jacket on before Annie was off the phone. He had bad memories of a rainy night with Charlie Howe in it.

Annie had been wearing the famous old stripy sweater from the night the God of Policing had thrown them together. The sweater had holes in both elbows now. Worn these days only as a kind of talisman against evil fate.

Yeh, right. Putting down the phone, Annie had finally told him the real reason Charlie was coming round. What she’d already known about the old bastard but had kept to herself in the hope he’d come to his senses. Bliss had just stared at Annie, and she’d looked down at her slippers. It was like a bad joke. Except Annie didn’t do jokes.

‘—OK, boss?’ Patti Calder said through the blast. ‘You look—’

‘Just recovering from a bit of awkward news, Patti. Not your problem.’ Though it could be a problem for all of them, soon enough. ‘Listen, how bad is it, really? I’m assuming nobody’s actually been under a fallen tree?’

Darryl Mills laughed, and the rest got blown away. Bliss thrust his head into the weather.

‘What?’

Maybe too much to hope that a ten-ton oak had come down on Charlie Howe’s car with Charlie inside.

Darryl bent to Bliss’s window.

‘We almost got excited, boss, but it was nothing.’

‘No, go on,’ Bliss said. ‘What?’

When he left his car on a double yellow in East Street, the rain had stopped and the wind was dying back. Not yet seven p.m., and Hurricane Lorna was already over the hill, an old prozzie parading what was left of her in the brick alleyways accessing Castle Green and the River Wye.

Driving into the city, it had looked surreal, out of time: hardly anybody on the streets, whole areas blacked out except for the lonely flickering of candles and lamps behind fogged glass. The Cathedral tower was a grey smudge in the gaps between buildings.

Bliss was in jeans and beanie and a fleece he didn’t need – under the wind, it was weirdly warm for the time of year. When he saw lights up ahead, they were actually on Castle Green, lights in a huddle, like a small camp or a party for the homeless. He felt his way along the rails by the long duck pond that used to be part of the castle moat in the days when there was a castle on the Green. Just a spread of parkland, now, with a Nelson’s column in the middle, and then the River Wye.

Bliss paused on the path above the Green, dead leaves spinning around him like moths on steroids. It was hardly unusual for a body to be uncovered here. This being an historical site, it was almost certainly going to be an historic body, nothing in this for him. But still he kept on walking towards the lights. If he went home he’d just be sitting in the dark, listening to the last of the storm and the slithery sound of shit rising to the surface.

Nothing to say he’ll get it.

Annie’s voice in his head, parched with uncertainty.

Equally, Annie, there’s nothing to say he won’t. I’ve actually met people who love the fucker and not all of them criminals.

They actually liked that about Charlie Howe. Bit of a maverick, law unto himself, Jack the lad. And a local boy, see. Always important.

He gets it, I’m out of here, Bliss had told Annie. Obviously.

Not thinking, until he’d left, about the weight of what he’d said there and what it would mean to her. One way or another this was going to cause all kinds of—

‘Boss?’

A hand-lamp’s broad beam swung past his face before tilting back to light up DC David Vaynor, striding towards him across the grass, cutting through the wind like a long blade.

‘Didn’t know you were coming out.’ Vaynor shining the light down the Green. ‘Something and nothing, boss. Anywhere else it’d be something, here it’s nothing.’

‘Just passing, Darth,’ Bliss said, and then the beam landed on something massive and unexpected, writhing and clicking in the wind. ‘Bloody hell.’

‘Ripped clean out,’ Vaynor said. ‘Roots and all.’

Behind the roots, a jungle of clashing branches, pale and bloated in the lamplight.

‘Nobody heard it coming down, with the wind,’ Vaynor said. ‘Nobody saw it happening with all the lights out. Heavy enough to flatten a Land Rover. Anybody been walking past at the time… no chance.’

‘Sure there’s nobody underneath, are we?’

‘Only our friend. And he’s well out of it. Assuming it’s a bloke.’

By the time they’d reached the fallen tree, the lamp had found a pick up truck and people erecting an orange barrier fence, plastic mesh, not easy in this wind. Bliss stopped next to a wooden bench.

‘So where is he?’

‘Just there.’

The torch lighting yellow plastic sheeting and disturbed earth that looked like a plundered badger sett. Vaynor telling Bliss somebody from the Cathedral had come over, spotted bones down there and rung a mate from the county archaeologist’s department. If you lived around Castle Green you could get to know a lot of archaeologists.

‘Neil Cooper,’ Vaynor said. ‘He’s around, somewhere.’

‘Yeh, I know him.’

‘Those are the council blokes, with the fencing. They’ll probably take the opportunity to excavate properly when the tree’s removed. Get him over, shall I?’

‘No, finish the story.’

Darth said Cooper had gone into the hole, confirmed they weren’t animal bones and then followed established procedure, getting word to Gaol Street. Hence Big Patti and Darryl Mills getting diverted to Castle Green at the start of their shift.

‘And they’re definitely old bones?’

‘Looked old to me, boss. And with a tree that big on top? Cooper’s thinking medieval.’

‘So what you doing here then, Darth?’

‘Just a slight complication, boss.’

They had one of these ten zillion candlepower lamps running from the truck. On the edge of its savage beam, Cooper, under his yellow hard hat, looked a bag of nerves. Kept rubbing his jaw, leaving mud-scrapes.

‘Can’t believe this. You turn your back for… five minutes?’

Nice-enough lad, a few years younger than Bliss, youthful-looking, just about, like a member of a boy band, now retired. Cooper had been with the county archaeologist’s department as long as Bliss had been in Hereford and now, apparently, was running the show while the top guy was recovering from some injury.

‘Let me get this right, Neil. This was when you’d come out of the hole to call the police, right? That was when you reckon it happened.’

‘Possibly then, or could’ve been earlier. Very dark and really noisy with the wind in the branches. That’s why I went to make the call from the top of the bank. Couldn’t hear a thing down here.’

No more than half a dozen people around now. Novelty over. Bliss looked down at the plastic sheeting covering the hole, stones weighting it down.

‘How many people would’ve been left around the tree while you were on the phone?’

‘Not sure. More by the time I got back.’

‘Who were they?’

‘Nobody I knew. I imagine word was spreading. Shops not long closed. I was trying to be polite and tell them there was nothing to see, but it was clear it had got out about the bones. People love bones, don’t they?’

‘You reckon?’

Neil Cooper bent, lifted a brick so he could draw back a corner of the plastic sheet, plywood slats underneath. He lifted one, beckoning Vaynor to shine his lamp down. In the earth, Bliss made out what might have been part of a ribcage, flattened like old rubber. Interesting but hard to love.

‘Not exactly the first bones found here, right?’

‘What? Oh no. Good God, no. And the nearer you get to the Cathedral… it’s like one big charnel house under there. Bones upon bones, upon bones. Thousands of skeletons, men, women, children discovered in The Close. And people were buried here – on what became Castle Green – before there was a cathedral. Hundreds of bodies found.’

‘So how come they missed this feller?’

‘Just that we don’t make a habit of destroying mature trees to see what might be underneath. But when one happens to blow down…’

‘Was it a full skeleton? When it was first revealed?’

Cooper winced. Behind him, the dying wind was wheezing like an old Hoover.

‘What I’m asking, Neil, is are you absolutely sure it originally had a head?’

‘Francis, leaning over the hole I was this….’ Cooper opened his muddied hands to the width of a brick, ‘this far away from it. I was staring into its eye-sockets. Amazingly, the roots had not become entangled in the skeleton, or the bones would’ve been dragged up and they’d be all over the place. The roots stopped just above the bones, so it was virtually all exposed.’

‘So when did it not have a head?’

‘All right.’ Cooper nodding hard, drawing breath. ‘It was still raining so I covered it over lightly with some soil before I went to call the police.’

‘Having already phoned your colleagues to come and assist?’

‘By the time I got back they were here with the truck.’

‘So who was here while you were on the phone?’

‘You’ve asked me that before. I don’t know. It was very dark.’

‘And when the police came… did they see the head, the skull?’

Vaynor tapped Bliss’s arm, shaking his head. Figured. On a night like this Mills and Calder would’ve lost interest rapidly when they learned the corpse wasn’t exactly fresh. Called in, cleared off.

‘And you’ve looked all around?’ Bliss said.

‘Best we could, with all this mess. We’re not really going to get anywhere without chainsaws, and that’s not going to happen till tomorrow. Yes, I suppose it’s possible somebody might’ve picked up the skull and then thrown it down somewhere.’

‘Or even in the river.’

‘Don’t.’

Cooper turning away.

‘It’s really not your fault, mate,’ Bliss said. ‘Bloody chaos here, these conditions.’

‘Couldn’t just have got mislaid, kicked away, I’m sure of that. Somebody had to have gone down in the hole and lifted it out. Now who would want to do that?’

‘Neil…’ Bliss exchanged a lamplit glance with Darth Vaynor. ‘I’m not saying that’s a naive question exactly, but… Were there any kids here? Teenagers?’

‘Kids?’

The team erecting the head-high protective fence had nearly finished and were waiting, a respectful distance away, with the last section at their feet and a sign saying DANGER.

Neil Cooper sank his hands into his jacket pockets.

‘If it is kids, it’ll be in pieces by now.’

‘Maybe not,’ Bliss said. ‘Could be on a shelf in a teenager’s bedroom. A ciggy between its teeth.’

‘Thanks for that, Francis.’

Cooper didn’t look at him. Well, what did he think – that they’d be doing house-to-house, putting out a photofit of some bugger who’d passed on eight centuries ago? Was body-snatching still an offence? Was this body-snatching, or just petty theft? And from whom? Who owned rotting old bones?

Police life was too short for this. And yet…

‘Nothing else you want to tell me, is there, Neil? Something that might not be obvious to dumb coppers?’

Lifting an apologetic hand to Vaynor, who had some totally unnecessary posh degree from Oxford.

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Cooper said.

‘Well, if you think of anything, Neil,’ Bliss said, ‘you know where I am.’

For a while, anyway.

Till he was forced to leave Hereford due to the resurrection of something old but recent enough to stink.

Bliss turned back into the wind, gritting his teeth, firming up his beanie.

3

Hallowe’en. Normal, irrational anxieties

HUW OWEN’S PHONE voice always brought up the same portrait, in the style of Whistler’s Mother only sloppier. Spiritual director in repose in a severe rectory in the Brecon Beacons. Sitting back, stretching out his legs in frayed jeans, no shoes. Rag-haired Welshman with a Yorkshire accent and holes in his socks.

‘Just my annual Hallowe’en call, lass,’ he said.

Merrily said nothing. She didn’t recall him ever phoning her at Hallowe’en before. More likely, he’d just sat down, examined his mental agenda and noticed the word Merrily had found its way to the top.

Sitting at her desk in the old scullery, in a circle of light from the Anglepoise lamp, she sipped tea and winced: too hot, too strong, no sugar.

‘Well, come on,’ Huw said. ‘How’d it go?’

‘How did what go?’

‘Him. Him in the Bishop’s Palace.’

‘I haven’t met him yet.’

‘I thought it were today.’

‘It’s tomorrow.’

‘Oh.’

They’d not spoken for a couple of weeks. Not since she’d run the name of the new Bishop of Hereford past him and his reaction had been fast and… the word was probably forthright. And then he’d calmed down, said maybe he’d overreacted, ignore him, he had a lot of work on. So she’d ignored him, put it out of her head that there might be dark history between Huw Owen and the new Bishop of Hereford, who’d replaced poor old Bernie Dunmore with unusual speed.

It was too warm, the warmest Hallowe’en she could remember. Rain had blown through, leaving the roads faintly steaming. The neck of her clerical shirt was undone, the dog collar on the desk by the phone. The last day of October. It was unnatural.

‘You’ve been quiet,’ Huw said.

‘Well… domestic stuff. Jane came back yesterday. Lol’s coming back tomorrow. Getting organized. All that.’

A silence.

‘That woman sorted? Her in the hairdresser’s house?’

‘Hopefully.’

A few weeks ago she’d expected to be summoned to give evidence at crown court where a woman was being tried for murder. Knowing that, when the case was reported in the media, she would be the defendant, forced to explain to a jury exactly what she did, as a so-called exorcist, and why she thought it was necessary and relevant. All the time knowing she’d only been put in the witness box to be taken apart, bit by bit, in front of a roomful of sceptics so that the defence could show how an already disturbed woman had been pushed over the edge by the belief that her home was still occupied by a dead previous occupant.

A belief that the so-called diocesan deliverance minister had done nothing to discourage.

But the woman had pleaded guilty. No trial.

Salvation. For now.

‘Still getting the anxiety dreams, mind,’ Merrily said.

‘Aye.’

More silence, several heartbeats’ worth. Then his voice was louder in the old Bakelite phone.

‘I’m always here, you know. Might be a miserable old bugger, but I’m not going anywhere. Yet.’

‘Good. I’m glad.’

‘What about you?’

‘What?’ She swallowed too much tea and burned her tongue. ‘Why does everybody suddenly think I want out?’

‘Who else thinks you want out?’

‘I dunno, I— You remember Anthea White?’

‘Athena?’

‘As she prefers to be known. Athena, yes.’ She didn’t think Huw had met Miss White. If they ever did, it would be epic, gladiatorial. ‘I dropped in on her, last week.’

‘She’s a witch.’

‘Actually, she despises witches.’

‘In the original sense. How come you keep putting yourself through it?’

‘I dunno. She’s been helpful to me, as you know, even though I feel it would be wrong to tell her that. She knows all the places… all the places angels fear to tread. Because of what they might pick up on their sandals.’

‘So I’ve heard.’

‘Also I know she’s never going to admit how lonely she is. And so, occasionally, I… expose myself to it. I’d hate to think we’re two halves of something, but… Anyway she looks at me in that knowing, baleful way, like some evil granny, and she asks me if I’m thinking of packing it in.’

‘The Night Job.’

The Night Job. Jane had been the first to call it that. Huw loved it, had added it to his lexicon of secret-service style euphemisms for this madness.

‘The lot, actually. The whole fancy-dress party. Cassock in the Oxfam bank, as she put it. Which was odd because I’d just been thinking about that, in quite a level, realistic kind of way. I’d been over to Hay, to look in on the Thorogoods in their shop. See how things are now.’

‘Aftercare.’

‘Mmm.’

Part of the deliverance programme; in the end, she’d done a minor exorcism of place in the shop in Back Fold. Betty Thorogood had phoned, Merrily asking her what they’d be doing tonight, for Samhain, the Celtic Feast of the Dead. Nothing, Betty had said. It doesn’t matter any more.

And Merrily had found that disturbing because she’d thought it did matter. They’d followed a spiritual path, believing in something bigger, albeit pagan, and now, because they felt it had rebounded on them…

Supporting the heavy old phone with both hands, she stared into the empty dog collar on the desk. She could hear Jane coming downstairs, home prematurely from Pembrokeshire. After so many weeks alone in the house, it sounded like burglars. Jane had once delighted in paganism, too. A couple of years ago, the kid would be galvanized by Samhain. This morning, she hadn’t mentioned it, perhaps hadn’t even noticed the date.

‘It’s a secular society, Huw. Comparatively few of us will now admit to believing in anything unscientific. I can accept that half the world thinks I’m fooling myself. What’s harder to take is that a proportion of the other half think I’m trying to fool them.’

‘You’re grasping at straws, thinking any kind of spirituality – paganism, whatever – is better than nowt?’

‘And how far the night job is conditioning my own faith. No, of course, I don’t want out. It’s just that sometimes you examine your reasons for carrying on.’

‘Ah,’ he said.

Like he knew what was coming, and maybe he did.

‘Bottom line, I’ve even asked myself if I could do one without the other now. And that’s not good at all. The Night Job’s become a touchstone.’

‘Touchstone,’ Huw said. ‘What a lovely word that is.’

‘Like I’m starting to measure everything against whatever evidence of transcendence – or an afterlife or something else – that I’ve collected through working as an exorcist. Like I’m using the woo-woo stuff as support for an increasingly unstable belief system.’

‘Highlighting a failure of faith?’

‘Isn’t it?’

The phone felt damp against her skin. She scrabbled around for her cigarettes and then remembered. Bugger.

‘Listen,’ Huw said, ‘I can’t tell you how strong your faith is. That’s summat between you and Him. Or Her, depending. Or it might be faith’s just a device to enable us to carry on in the face of all the shit, and some of us need that bit of extra hands-on to top it up. For which—’

‘Yeah, but if we need that—’

‘—for which, if you hadn’t realized this, we bloody suffer. We get extra shit.’

‘We can’t win?’

His laughter crackled in the heavy old phone, multiple creaks suggesting he was coming to his feet.

‘Jesus Christ, you want to be seen to win now?’

She was silent. The whole house was silent. Last night, she and Jane had crouched over an open fire in the sitting room, and she’d sensed an uncertainty in Jane about the future, about what kind of adult she wanted to be. She’d been working with real archaeologists in West Wales to get an idea of whether she wanted to become one, whether real archaeology would support her fascination with ancient myths in the landscape or crush it.

‘You still there, lass?’

‘Sorry. I try to be open to possibilities while, at the same time, sceptical and impervious to people like Anthea White who undoubtedly know how to mess with minds. But I don’t know what kind of person this is turning me into.’

And was she going to be the same person Lol had loved?

He was coming home tomorrow after a long summer of touring, session work, production work. All of it good for him. Maybe too good. So good he’d be restless. So good that Ledwardine, the village he’d once been almost agoraphobically reluctant to leave, would probably seem tame and restrictive.

Normal, irrational anxieties. Hints of an early menopause? God, don’t start that again. Merrily found the e-cig in her bag. It had run out of charge. She had a packet of cigarettes in a drawer in the kitchen, but if Jane smelled smoke…

‘So, it’s tomorrow.’

‘Huh? Oh… yeah, the Bishop. He’s coming over to the gatehouse. Sophie says he wants to see the set-up.’

‘Sophie’s staying on as Bishop’s secretary?’

‘And mine. I hope. And probably whoever comes after me.’

‘She said owt to you?’

‘No.’

It had all happened with unexpected haste. They’d thought at first that Bernie Dunmore’s stroke would be less disabling. Hadn’t expected him to call it a day so rapidly. And suddenly he’d gone and there was a new Bishop of Hereford.

Huw said, ‘What’s the word in the cloisters? About the new regime.’

‘I’ve no idea. I don’t spend time in the cloisters.’

‘Happen you should. Them Cathedral lads always hear the whispers.’

‘Huw—’

‘Course, he might’ve changed.’

‘You keep saying that… When I first hung his name on you, you asked me to pardon your French and then you called him—’

‘I know what I called him. And it were thoughtless of me to burden you, wi’ my prejudices.’

‘Might’ve been less thoughtless if you’d gone on to tell me what they were. No! Sorry. I don’t want to know. I’ll make up my own—’

‘Quite right.’ Huw paused. ‘So what time are you scheduled to meet the cunt?’

‘Two-thirty tomorrow afternoon. You want me to give you a call afterwards?’

‘If you want. I’ll happen send up a prayer for you, lass.’

4

Win-win

FOR A FEW moments, it looked to Lol like the old days. Car lights on the square warped in ancient glass, the shifting of apple logs in the hearth. Familiar cider taps on the bar top. Except that Barry was wearing a raffish black eye patch and, against the Jacobean oak of the pillars, the smoke pluming around Gomer Parry was Vatican-white.

It couldn’t be…

He pulled out a stool under the long mullioned window, next to Gomer, who glanced at him, nodding.

‘Ow’re you, boy.’

Lol registered that it wasn’t smoke.

‘Gomer?’

The old guy looked down, through his glasses, at the device in his hand, smiled.

‘Janey, this is.’

‘Gave you that?’

‘Present from Pembroke.’

‘And you’re… getting on OK with it?’

‘En’t bad,’ Gomer said.

God, you really had to hand it to Jane. The old guy must’ve been doing roll-ups for well over sixty years.

Barry was watching from behind the bar, formally attired with it being Friday night: black suit, black eye patch. In no time at all, the patch had become part of his legend, another ex-SAS emblem, except it was more recent. Lol felt close to tears, all they’d gone through together, these guys and him. He never wanted to leave this village for so long again. Maybe wouldn’t have to.

He nodded at Gomer’s cider glass.

‘Another one?’

Whole weeks had passed over the summer and early autumn with Lol only occasionally getting back to Ledwardine, each time having to leave after less than two days. No half measures with touring. He hadn’t liked it one bit, but he’d done it.

Proving he could.

And then, just as it was coming to an end, Prof Levin had called to say Belladonna was demanding his services as session man – sole session man – on the comeback album nobody other than Bell was going to describe as long-awaited. It had taken the best part of a month at Knight’s Frome studio. Another month away. With Bell, you couldn’t snatch days off, couldn’t even count on a full night’s sleep. A woman that age with so much latent creative energy, it was scary.

But he was a professional again. Hell, not even again, this was probably the first time. He’d earned the right to return, look guys like Barry in the eye when he walked into the Black Swan.

And then, as he was preparing to leave this morning, job done, Prof, instead of just handing him an envelope, had taken him into the office to write a cheque.

But that wasn’t the half of it.

Bloody hell.

‘Thing is,’ Gomer said, ‘I can do it in yere and he can’t say nothin’, see.’

‘Not yet, anyway,’ Barry said. ‘Government’ll doubtless find a way of screwing it. Or taxing it bigtime. It’s what those bastards live for.’

Gomer wafted the vapour at him as the e-cig lit up green. The tube looked like a combination of opium pipe and hypodermic.

‘En’t giving up proper ciggies, mind. Rollin’ a ciggy quiets your mind, see, gives you a bit o’ time to think summat over.’ Gomer turned to Lol. ‘Where’s the vicar?’

Lol nodded at the e-cig.

‘Did Jane, er…?’

‘Oh hell, aye. Brung one for the vicar, too.’

‘Blimey.’

‘En’t seen her with it yet, mind.’

Lol gazed around the bar to see if anything else had changed in the dimness between the mullioned windows and the smouldering logs. No candles, no pumpkins, no concessions to Hallowe’en; this was England. Barry brought over Lol’s half of cider and one for Gomer, picked up Lol’s tenner from the mat.

‘Merrily said you wasn’t coming back till tomorrow.’

‘Yeah, well, we worked all last night in the studio. In case there were going to be power cuts tonight. Finished mid morning. So I came back early. And the storm didn’t last. Win-win.’

Lol shivered. Not a phrase he’d ever used before. The night was mild, but the logs in the big ingle were alive. Dry, fragrant apple logs, and a stack of them. Barry was no longer having to economize. Might only have one eye but at least he now owned half the Swan – something to rebuild.

Back at the bar, he’d offered Lol a fee to do a gig here in a couple of weeks’ time. Lol had said yes but thought he might not take the money. He didn’t really need to take money from Barry.

Didn’t need…

He drank some cider, feeling the strangeness of it, looked up at Barry.

‘I was thinking… Merrily doesn’t know I’m back. Thinking maybe I could surprise her, and we could come back and have dinner in the restaurant?’

‘Dinner?’ Barry said.

‘You got a table free, about nine? Maybe Jane, too?’

Neither he nor Merrily had ever actually dined at the Swan except for the celebration night when Barry had acquired half the pub. Sandwiches. On a good week, they did sandwiches.

Barry looked uncertain.

‘She might’ve eaten already. Not used to… late dinner. You know?’

‘No. No, you’re right. I didn’t think.’

‘You better ring her, mate.’

‘Right.’

‘You all right, Laurence?’

‘Think so.’

Lol brought out his phone then he turned at the sound of laughter outside, saw Barry frown.

‘Here we go.’

Through the old glass, torchlight brought up chalky face-masks in the market square.

‘Not even dark yet,’ Barry said, ‘and out they come. Demands, with menaces. Worst thing to cross the Atlantic since McDonald’s. Let’s show little kids how to prey on pensioners.’

5

… or treat

MUM SAID, ‘GET that, would you, flower?’

Calling down the stairs. She’d been in the bathroom, doing her face, actually singing to herself. She’d got out the new black and silvery knitted dress, from the summer sale at Ross Labels.

For Lol, this was. Lol had rung. Lol was back early and inviting Mum to dinner at the Swan, for heaven’s sake. Jane had absolutely refused to join them. She wasn’t stupid. Whoever was at the door, she’d tell them the vicar was out or in the bath or something.

The bell rang again, too soon, conveying impatience. It annoyed the hell out of Jane, how people thought vicarage hours were like 24/7 for any kind of trivia. For the kind of money Mum collected.

She waited. In the Holman-Hunt print by the side of the front door, Jesus was limply dangling his lantern over a few Mars bars lying on the table underneath.

Oh, right. Of course.

Jane hung on a while longer then opened the door to four kids, all male, packed into the open porch under the light. One was mumbling trick or treat, in a nonchalant way, like he was here to read the meter. You expected them to flash their ID: We are accredited children, give us stuff.

Jane checked them out, recognizing one as Jude Wall, Dean Wall’s little brother, though not little any more – close to sixteen and even closer to clinically obese. He was the only one of them not ghouled-up, probably figuring his normal face was scarier. His mask was pushed back on his head. He wore an old black overcoat. Two of the others carried rucksacks for the loot, which was all that the Celtic feast of the dead meant to these little bastards.

A car drew up in the street outside, headlights brushing the vicarage hedge.

‘Trick,’ Jane said.

A kid said, ‘You what?’

Jane shrugged.

‘Go on. Spook me.’

Just as she’d figured: nobody had ever said trick to them before. Probably not ever. They didn’t even have a trick. They were the trick.

Actually it might not have been the wisest thing to say. One of them had a hand moving inside a pocket of his hoodie. What if he had a knife down there? In Ledwardine? Oh yeah, after a gap of a century or so, people had been stabbed in Ledwardine again. And the vicarage was well screened from the village, with only the empty church on one side. People were always getting stabbed at vicarages.

The kids were swapping glances, ghoul-mask to ghoul-mask. If they did anything remotely funny or original, she’d hand over the Mars bars, get rid of them. If they didn’t… well, she couldn’t back down now.

Actually, under the light, they all looked too old for this. Maybe they were just accumulating stuff they could trade for pills down the Ox. According to Mum, Jude Wall’s older brother was on bail, having finally been found with a stash that merited more than the police cautions he’d been collecting since before his balls dropped.

‘I mean, “trick or treat”?’ Jane said reasonably. ‘What’s it mean? Why?’

She waited, watching the hand in the pocket. The air was sweet with applewood smoke from the chimneys of the Black Swan across the square. The night was far too warm for the end of the old Celtic year. The storm had made sense, but it had faded. Which was so wrong. Like these kids, climate change had no respect for tradition.

‘I mean, any of you guys even know what Hallowe’en’s about?’

They looked at one another again, and then the reply came back, boxy from behind a mask.

‘Horror.’

‘Oh. Right. And what’s that mean?’

‘You really wanner find out?’ a thin kid said.

The boy next to him giggled. Jane said nothing. She became aware that they’d divided, two standing either side of Jane so she couldn’t keep them all in focus. Jude Wall had pulled his mask down over his face. It was a zombie mask, corpse-white with black radial lines through its thin lips. He drew a long, hissing breath and, one by one, the others joined in, and then the applewood scent was soured by beer-breath, which was…

… coming from behind. Jane saw, turning, that one of them was now between her and the door to the house.

‘All right,’ she said, maybe too sharply. ‘Back over there.’

The kid laughed.

‘Getting scared, now, is it?’

Jane stared at him, hands on her hips. He had a vampire mask, blood bubbles down its chin. He lifted his arms, raising long shadows under the porch light.

‘Yeah, I’m trembling,’ Jane said. ‘Now piss off over there, before I—’

She stopped. They were silent, all looking behind them towards the sound of footsteps on the drive. She saw a slender man, wearing a suit, the pool of porch light bringing up a sheen on his shoes.

‘I do hope these children aren’t bothering you, Mrs Watkins.’

His voice was quite low, a purr.

One of the kids hissed, ‘Children? Children?’

But they were still edging out of the porch.

The guy didn’t even look at them. He wore a long Edwardian kind of jacket, and his hair was swept back from his forehead, hanging behind to his shoulders. He wasn’t very tall but his back was straight, his head held high and, somehow, there was more of Hallowe’en about him than any of them.

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘You’re obviously not Mrs Watkins.’

Jane stepped out.

‘I’m her daughter. She’s—’

‘It’s OK, flower.’

A hand closed around her arm. Mum was behind her in the porch, all made up, aglow. Mum could still be quite something when she shed the vicar kit. She slid alongside Jane. Perfume. Wow.

‘Oh,’ Mum said quietly. ‘Mr Khan.’

She knew him?

‘My apologies.’ His voice was like satin. ‘I would’ve phoned first, but I’d been to visit my cousin, found I was passing and it occurred to me that I should call in.’

Mum said nothing. She let go of Jane’s arm. Jane scowled. One of the fundamentals of being a vicar: you thought you had to let every bastard in, like that was how God would want it.

‘You’re going out?’ He appraised her. ‘Or expecting a guest? If this is inconvenient, I can come back.’

Jane saw the kids had slunk away into shadows. Mum evidently hadn’t noticed them. She put an arm lightly around Jane’s shoulders.

‘Flower… could you just pop over to the Swan for me, and tell Lol I’ll be over as soon as I can? You stay and have a drink with him.’

‘You’ll be OK?’

Asking because it had just occurred to her who this guy might be. Mr Khan. Bloody hell. Flashback to a summer night out in Eirion’s car. A traditional-looking pub which, inside, had proved to be anything but. Actually a good night. Cool music. And this guy in a white suit, periodically passing through the crowd like a spectre.

The next time she’d seen him had been in a picture in the Hereford Times, with a group of local dignitaries outside some derelict building down by the river that they were redeveloping as a bar and restaurant. Mr Hereford Nightlife.

‘I’ll be fine,’ Mum said.

Because, of course, she did know him. Raji Khan. Bloody hell.

‘Well… OK.’

Under the light of the street lamp outside the vicarage gates, Jane saw Jude Wall leaning over from the other side, was pretty sure he let go a gob of spit. Halfway down the drive, she turned and saw Mum following the guy into the house. The porch light went out and the vicarage faded back into the seventeenth century. Jane slipped between the trees and out through the gates where a single street lamp overhung the guy’s posh car. She wanted to kick it. Like what if Lol planned to talk to Mum about… well, about the future?

On the square, the council had reduced the street lighting to save money. The fake gaslamps were unlit and the black and white buildings were grey and greyer in the moonless early night. Only the Black Swan was a beacon, its sunken old windows like lanterns. She didn’t think Jude Wall and his mates would be too far away, but she only had to cross the street to the cobbles where cars were parked outside the Swan.

She didn’t run and she didn’t look behind her until she reached the front of the pub where she stood with her back to the wall, aware of breathing too hard.

Seemed ridiculous being scared of children, and yet it really wasn’t any more. In Pembrokeshire, a couple of the archaeologists had talked about having to work mob-handed these days because kids would nick anything, and if you got in their way… One of the guys had a mate who’d once been kicked into a trench and stoned with his own rubble.

Not that this neo-Biblical stuff had put her off archaeology, exactly, so much as how futile the job seemed to have become in other respects. Jane surveyed the shadowed centre of what was still called The Village in the Orchard, although most of the orchard was long gone. A lot of serious archaeology under here, possibly including the remains of a Neolithic henge that might only be discovered if some unsightly development got planning permission and the developers were forced to finance a dig to find out. And then they’d flatten it and build on top.

This was mostly what archaeology was about now – drawing a memory map of a Britain nobody was ever going to see again. Britain before it got turned into a shithole. As for rediscovering the magic in the land… She’d gone to Pembs, eyes open, with no mystical baggage. Determined that the phrases like ancient energy would never pass her lips in front of anyone with a degree in archaeology. And then one of them had said, More things, Horatio, more things. And something changed. Her face was burning now as she recalled waking up on that last morning not knowing who or what she was any more.

Jane took a couple of breaths, walked up the steps to the front door of the Swan. Most people these days went in through the alleyway, with its bracket lamps and disabled access, but Jane liked the old, worn steps. On the top one, an eruption of giggling sent her spinning round, and she glimpsed shady movement across the road, below the vicarage. Where the car was parked. Khan’s car, something smooth and bronze, maybe one of those compact Jags.

The little bastards. Were they using the car as cover for something or trying to break into it?

She heard rapid footsteps coming up from Church Lane, where Lol lived, so she knew she wasn’t alone. She slipped back down the steps, moved quietly onto the square, keeping close to the parked cars there. A man came out of Church Street, ran across the road. She heard a cry from behind Khan’s car, saw shadows rising, and then something was flung out like a rag.

She saw hands clawing at the air, recognized Jude Wall as the zombie mask came off. The big kid was sprawling in the wet road, the man standing over him as Jane took hesitant steps, pulling her phone from a hip pocket of her jeans. Stopping well short of the action, ready to run back.

When the man looked directly at her, even a scrappy beard couldn’t disguise Jude’s older brother, Dean Wall. Didn’t seem that long since they’d been at school together. First time she’d thought of him as a man as distinct from a bully and a slob.

Jude Wall tried to get up, and Dean glanced down and kicked him hard in the back. Jude yelped.

‘Shut the fuck up, boy,’ Dean said calmly, ‘else you’ll get one in the teeth.’ He looked up at Jane again. ‘Do my brother a favour he don’t deserve, Jane. Don’t tell him.’

‘Him?’

‘Don’t tell him who done it. Don’t want no trouble.’

Dean nodded at the car and then bent down.

Jane said, ‘Trouble?’

She saw he’d picked up a knife from the kerb. He shut the blade, zipped it into a pocket of his cargo trousers, Jude squirming crablike out of the road, tripping over his long coat.

‘All right, Jane?’ Dean said. ‘Not a word?’

This was like weird, dreamlike. Needing to keep a modicum of cool, Jane told him she’d think about it, and Dean Wall nodded. He’d lost weight, maybe donated it to his brother. He stood looking down at the boot of Khan’s car. Under the lone street lamp, you could see the number plate.

SUF 1

Personalized, obviously. What did it mean? She ought to know, but she didn’t ask Dean, having just seen what his brother’s knife had done to the Jag’s paintwork. One word scratched in. Almost.

childre

‘He called them children,’ Jane said. Her own voice sounded hollow. ‘And they were offended?’

Respect was all, especially if you were never going to deserve any. She felt sick, dislocated. Jude Wall was whimpering, gutter-dirt mingling with the syrupy blood on his face. Dean made a contemptuous, snorty noise.

‘Got no brains at all, this boy,’ he said.

6

Nightlife

MERRILY FED A log into the kitchen wood-stove and the one below it collapsed into pink and orange flakes. She closed the cast-iron door, and the new log flared in the glass. Mr Khan wandered over.

‘Not as simple as it appears, wood-burning.’

His voice unrolling like an expensive carpet. Long black hair flopping over his forehead as he bowed. He did things like that, all these period-English flourishes. She recalled the one other time she’d met him, in his office at the Royal Oak near Wychehill in the Malvern Hills, all velvety Victorian, like Sherlock Holmes’s sitting room.

Rajab Ali Khan, owner of nightclubs. Elegant, educated and barely thirty.

‘Quite astonishing,’ he said, ‘the amount of wood needed to fuel one of these things over the winter months. One of the peculiarly rural problems my cousin is having to cope with. Not a rural person, my cousin.’

Not the first time tonight that he’d mentioned his cousin. Been to visit this cousin, he’d said, and decided to call in on his way home.

Except his cousin lived down in the Golden Valley and if Mr Khan was still based in Worcestershire this was not his way home. Get him out, Frannie Bliss would say, if he knew. Get rid of the little shit.

Rajab Ali Khan, sometimes philanthropist and co-opted member of various diversity advisory committees. The young entrepreneur who’d converted a rambling country pub into a venue for loud music. Unpopular with its neighbours, but you couldn’t be everybody’s friend. She’d once watched Frannie Bliss’s fingers actually curling with the need to feel Khan’s collar.

Due to him being a significant link in the West Midlands cocaine chain. Allegedly.

His smile was apologetic.

‘Actually we’re not so closely related. I just call him that.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Cousin.’ He turned away from the stove. ‘Mrs Watkins, I am so sorry. I had absolutely forgotten what night this was.’

‘Well, that’s…’

‘No, no. It’s unforgivably stupid of me. I arrive on All-Hallows’ Eve to consult you about a series of… anomalous occurrences. So embarrassing. Crass. Unsubtle. Not my style.’

‘Really, it’s… not a problem, Mr Khan,’ Merrily said, although of course it bloody was. ‘Good a night as any, and…’ Motioning him towards the refectory table. ‘I didn’t really imagine you’d come to book a wedding.’

Jane said, ‘I just… I can’t believe that happened. Any of it. One minute she’s getting all dolled up, singing in the bathroom, and then…’

It was like somebody had lit a slow fuse and there was no stopping it until there’d been an explosion.

Lol was half out of his seat.

‘So where is she?’

‘In the vicarage. With him. But…’ She reached out to his arm. ‘No… Honestly, she’s fine. Like, what’s he going to do? She knows him. She told me to come and have a drink with you and she’d be along later. There’s not going to be any more trouble. Not till he finds out what the little bastards did to his car, and even then… I don’t know.’

Her thoughts were swimming in the white noise of bar chat. Lol had been with Gomer and Barry, glasses on his nose, head turning as the door opened. Excusing himself quickly when he’d seen her face, guiding her to the little niche behind an oak pillar.

‘But Wall was scared?’ Lol said.

‘It was weird. You know what he’s like, all mouth and bullshit and phoney bravado. I thought he was going to give the kid a serious kicking.’

She sank back, head against the oak pillar. Bloody hell, you went away for a few weeks and it was like the whole climate had altered. Kids at the door, too old for what they were doing – trick or treat becoming a protection scam with menaces.

‘Dean Wall… he was always just a thick yob. But still a kid. Like when I was a kid. And now he’s a man. Facing charges for dealing, according to Mum.’

‘You don’t know if there’s history here. If Wall is on bail and the stories about Khan and the drug trade are true… I’m not sure what I’m saying here, Jane, I’m just a jobbing guitarist.’

He’d never expressed much of an opinion on drug use one way or the other. Probably a legacy of his unwarranted stretch in a psychiatric hospital on a diet of orange-coloured pills.

‘Remind me,’ Jane said. ‘Mum met Khan at Wychehill, in the course of the job?’

‘When Syd Spicer was vicar there. I went over with her a couple of times, as you know, but I never met Khan.’

‘Thing is, Lol, the dealers and the fences and all that in Hereford, they all live on the Plascarreg and everybody knows that. But Khan’s in another league. He has this respectable side. You see his picture in the paper with councillors.’

‘But he also has a respectable side?’ Lol said.

Jane laughed. She’d really missed Lol. Realized she hadn’t seen him for nearly two months. He was wearing a dark jacket over a sea-green T-shirt. Looking tired, but in a good way. His hair was shorter. Since he and Mum had become an item, she’d had to concentrate on not fancying him any more, counting every new grey hair, that kind of thing.

But now…

She felt queasy. In the mullioned window above their table, the panes of thick, scarred glass had dulled to near-opaque.

She dug out a smile.

‘You had this planned? Dinner?’

‘Not really, it was just a spur of the moment thing. With getting back early.’

‘Romantic.’

‘We’ve never actually done it before. Seemed like extravagance.’

‘Special occasion?’

‘Not really. Just that I’m home. Properly home.’

‘And, like… you have a little box in your pocket? With a ring in it?’

He looked worried.

‘You think I should have? You think she—?’

‘No.’ Jane patted his hand. ‘Bound to be the wrong kind. In the movies it can be like a curtain ring or a keyring. Real life, always more complicated. But hey…’

‘We have talked about it,’ Lol said.

‘Yeah, well, keep talking. If you ever get another chance.’

She wondered if she could talk to him properly. About some things she really would not like to tell Mum. She’d noticed how Lol had kept looking at her, puzzled, like he thought she’d changed.

God, what a mess she was.

Too warm in the glittery dress, too informal, too girly. God. Merrily had offered Mr Khan coffee, which he’d declined, then tea, which he’d accepted – did she have Earl Grey? She’d had to go down on her knees to a rarely opened cupboard under the worktop. The Earl Grey packet had been embarrassingly dusty.

‘As I recall,’ Mr Khan said, ‘when we met, you were investigating, on behalf of your diocese, a series of road accidents in the Malvern hills, prior to which the drivers experienced either the same hallucination or… something else.’

He paused, as if giving her a chance to finish the story, which she didn’t plan to do. It had no happy ending, they both knew that.

‘The job title is Diocesan Exorcist?’ he said. ‘Is that correct?’

‘Tends to operate under different names nowadays. Deliverance Consultant, Adviser on the Paranormal. I think the Church is hoping it’ll get lost in a scattering of inexact terminology.’

‘But you’re still doing that?’ he said.

‘Far as I know.’

‘The casting out of devils.’

‘Well, that’s a bit…’

‘Extreme?’

‘A bit.’

He nodded solemnly, leaning back in the cane chair, hands in his lap, the pot of Earl Grey between them on the refectory table. How long had he been feigning this absurd young-fogey gentility? What did he think it conveyed, apart from that he was someone you’d be a little crazy to trust?

‘OK, devils,’ Merrily said carefully. ‘Some of my colleagues would tell you that was all in the movies. I wouldn’t be quite so dismissive. Never had to carry out a major exorcism – that is, an attempt to release someone from alleged demonic possession. Never easy to distinguish from mental illness. Apparently.’

Raji Khan was nodding. He had his sinister side, but how much of that was theatre? He looked down and bent to pick up something from the flags.

Ethel, the cat. He sat her on his knees.

‘What about houses, Mrs Watkins?’

‘In what respect?’

‘Houses that might appear to be inhabited by… what you might call non-human…’ He fondled Ethel’s ears. ‘… presences.’

Mr Khan and Ethel waited, both golden-eyed in the lamplight. Merrily sat and thought for a moment.

‘A surprising number of people do come to believe something is sharing their homes.’

‘The dead? Or something else?’

‘In many cases, it’s simply a question of things getting moved around. Disarranged. Possibly linked with the extreme emotions – or hormones – of living people.’

‘Poltergeists.’

‘It’s word we’re stuck with, I’m afraid.’

‘And you can deal with that?’

‘Pest control? We do what we can. With…’ She raised her eyes briefly to the beams. ‘… whatever help we can get.’