Merrily Watkins collection 3: Prayer of the Night Shepherd and Smile of a Ghost E-Book

Phil Rickman

• Herausgeber: Corvus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

The Prayer of the Night Shepherd A crumbling hotel on the border of England and Wales. A suggestion of inherited evil, a strange love affair... and the long-disputed origins of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles. Young Jane Watkins is fascinated, but her mother, Merrily, Diocesan Exorcist, can soon see the sinister side. Especially when blood appears in the fresh snow. The Smile of a Ghost In the affluent, historic town of Ludlow, a teenage boy dies in a fall from the castle ruins. Accident or suicide? And why does the boy's uncle turn to exoricist Merrily Watkins? Merrily must work fast as the death toll rises, but there is a dangerous obsession lurking in these shadowed medieval streets.

Leseprobe

MERRILY WATKINS:

The Prayer of the Night Shepherd and The Smile of a Ghost

PHIL RICKMAN was born in Lancashire and lives on the Welsh border. He is the author of the Merrily Watkins series and The Bones of Avalon. He has won awards for his TV and radio journalism and writes and presents the book programme Phil the Shelf for BBC Radio Wales.

ALSO BY

PHILRICKMAN

THE MERRILY WATKINS SERIES

The Wine of Angels

Midwinter of the Spirit

A Crown of Lights

The Cure of Souls

The Lamp of the Wicked

The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

The Smile of a Ghost

The Remains of an Altar

The Fabric of Sin

To Dream of the Dead

The Secrets of Pain

THE JOHN DEE PAPERS

The Bones of Avalon

The Heresy of Dr Dee

OTHER TITLES

Candlenight

Curfew

The Man in the Moss

December

The Chalice

The Prayer of the Night Shepherd first published in Great Britain in 2004 by Macmillan.

The Smile of a Ghost first published in Great Britain in 2005 by Macmillan.

This e-book anthology published in Great Britain in 2013 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Phil Rickman, 2004, 2005.

The moral right of Phil Rickman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

The novels in this anthology are entirely works of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

E-book ISBN: 978 1 78239 151 7

Corvus An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd Ormond House 26–27 Boswell Street London WC1N 3JZwww.corvus-books.co.uk

Table of Contents

The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

The Smile of a Ghost

ALSO BY

PHILRICKMAN

THE MERRILY WATKINS SERIES

The Wine of Angels

Midwinter of the Spirit

A Crown of Lights

The Cure of Souls

The Lamp of the Wicked

The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

The Smile of a Ghost

The Remains of an Altar

The Fabric of Sin

To Dream of the Dead

The Secrets of Pain

THE JOHN DEE PAPERS

The Bones of Avalon

The Heresy of Dr Dee

OTHER TITLES

Candlenight

Curfew

The Man in the Moss

December

The Chalice

They had gone a mile or two when they passed one of the night shepherds upon the moorlands, and they cried to him to know if he had seen the hunt. And the man, as the story goes, was so crazed with fear that he could scarce speak...

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,

The Hound of the Baskervilles

No record in cold print can give the reader an idea of the pleasure experienced in collecting the elusive material we call folk-lore from the living brains of men and women of whose lives it has formed an integral part. In some cases, with regard to superstitious beliefs, there is a deep reserve to be overcome; the more real the belief, the greater the difficulty... The folk of the Welsh districts are more superstitious, as a rule...

Ella Mary Leather,

The Folk-lore of Herefordshire

Contents

Under Stanner in the Summer

Part One

1: Without the Song

2: Game Afoot

3: What Consultants Are For

4: The Room Under the Witch’s-Hat Tower

5: Drink Problem

6: Beastie

7: The Healing of the Dead

8: At Home With the Vaughans

9: Ask Arthur

10: Serious Requiem

11: Welshies

12: Night Exercise

13: Real Personal

Part Two

FOURTEEN: Word to the Wise

15: Milk into Concrete

16: Responding to Images

17: Detestable to the Lord

18: Shock of the Proof

19: Nancy Boy

TWENTY: Not About Foxes

Part Three

21: Cwn Annwn

22: Whoop, Whoop

23: Showdown Time

24: Necessary Penance

25: Shifting Big Furniture

26: White High

27: Five Barrels

28: The Jane Police

29: Twist

30: The Huntress

31: Noise and Blood

32: Party Game

33: Time Nearly Up

34: The Butcher’s Counter

Part Four

35: Fresh Blood

36: First Snow Casualty

37: The Schizoid Border

38: Big White Bird

39: What Brigid Did

40: Extreme

41: Living on the Edge of a Chasm

42: Alleluia

43: Tough Ole Bat

44: Sanctuary

45: Fatalist

46: The Living Dark Heart

47: Losers

48: Apocryphal

49: Requiem

50: Free Coward

51: Of the Midnight

52: These Things Happened

53: No Smoke, No Mirrors

54: Reichenbach

55: Sky’s Come Down

56: Christmas Eve

Under Stanner in the Summer

SHOULD HAVE KNOWN, he really should. That morning, even though it was a fine morning, coming up to high summer, the whole valley was singing with unease.

‘Oh bugger,’ Jeremy Berrows said to Danny. ‘You seen that?’

Up on Stanner Rocks, knobs of stone poked out like weathered gargoyles on an old church, or ancient skulls browned by the earth, half-buried, with scrubby trees in their eye sockets. From one side, you could sometimes see a whole body of rock that Danny reckoned looked like the remains of a dead giant thrown back into the greenery encrusting the cliff face.

But Jeremy wasn’t looking up at Stanner – likely he blamed the rocks for taking Mary Morson away, though in Danny’s view the rocks done him a favour on that one. He was staring instead at the smoky firs across the valley, the dark trees that said, This is Wales now, boy, make no mistake.

‘What?’ Danny said.

‘Big black crow. Hovering.’

‘No, really?’

‘Just flew over real low. Then he come back, flew over again.’

‘Gotter hand it to these scavengers,’ Danny said. ‘Awful thorough.’

Bollocks, he was thinking. You could drive yourself daft, seeing signs everywhere – even if you were Jeremy Berrows, with ditchwater in your veins and the valley talking to you all your life.

Could see where the boy was coming from today, mind. Even without crows, everything visible in the west seemed like a warning about Wales, a stiffened finger under your nose. But when you actually crossed the Border into Wales, the countryside relaxed into the easy, light-coloured, sheep-shaved hills where Danny Thomas had been born and bred and still lived.

Still lived. Jesus, how had that happened?

Danny was grinning in dismay, rubbing his beard, and the boy glanced at him but Danny just shook his head and tramped on down the dewy field under the fresh-rinsed morning sky, not sure any more which side of the Border they were on, or if it mattered. He was a Welshman himself, he supposed, although the way he talked wasn’t recognizably Welsh either to real Welsh people or to the English whose country was within shouting distance, and all the shouting, from either side, done in near enough the same accent as his.

Confusing, really: if Danny was from the lighter, more English-looking country down the Radnor Valley, which was actually in Wales, then Jeremy, back here under the dark firs and the knuckles of Stanner Rocks, must be...

‘You English, then, Jeremy?’

‘Me?’ Jeremy glanced warily at Danny, instinctively patting his thigh for Flag, the sheepdog, to come close. ‘Dunno. Do it matter?’

‘Matters to some,’ Danny said, ‘so they tells me.’

It was real confusing hereabouts, mind. For instance, the little town a mile or so behind them was in England, despite being on the Welsh side of Offa’s Dyke. Even so, with its narrow main street and its closed-in feel, it felt Welsh.

Kington: an anomaly.

This was Danny’s current favourite word. The naturalists he met in the pub used it about Stanner Rocks, said to be some of the oldest rocks in the country. Anomaly meant strange stuff going on, odd climatic things occurring up on the tops, resulting in plants that grew on Stanner and nowhere else in these islands. Local people rarely went up on the rocks these days, it being a National Nature Reserve protected by the Countryside Commission; mostly it was just the naturalists and a few tourists with permission.

But Mary Morson went up one day, and got a bit of a thing going with one of the naturalists and never come back to Jeremy Berrows, and mabbe the boy didn’t want reminding.

Boy. He must be late thirties now, but he had this fresh complexion, which was rare for a farmer. Most of them had skin like old brick – like Danny’s skin, in fact, what you could see of it between the grey beard and the seaweed hair. But it wasn’t only that; there was an innocence about Jeremy, and that was rare, too, in a farmer, especially a good one. Jeremy also had commitment, an intense... bonding was the word they used now, with this marginal ground. The kind of bonding that hinged on knowing that if the ash came out before the oak you were in for a soak, and that kind of stuff. Whatever you wanted to call it, it had drained out of Danny Thomas long ago, leaving a bleak old desert of regrets.

‘Down by there, it is.’ The boy was nodding his head towards the copse at the bottom of the field, where a bunch of fat lambs was gathering. ‘Other side of the ole conker tree. See him?’

They were up on a bit of a tump now, and you could see all of Jeremy’s ground, almost surrounded by the huge area owned by Sebbie Three Farms, the robber baron. And you could see the big, naked feet of the giant on the side of Stanner. Below the rock face was the main road where it turned into the Kington bypass, and a long yellow container lorry sailed past, like something out of a different time zone. Danny wondered if Jeremy even noticed the lorry – if all the boy saw wasn’t just grass and trees and the plumpening lambs and the hawthorn trees sprinkled with floury blossom.

And the intrusion. The vans that shouldn’t be there. Danny’s gaze followed a sheep track down to the bottom field, where he could make out a cool blue roof slashed by a blade of sunlight. But no movement down there, no noise.

‘Likely they won’t be up and about yet,’ he said. ‘Always stays up late, these folks, with the booze and the dope. And music. You year any music last night?’

Jeremy shook his head, and Danny looked wistfully away towards Hergest Ridge, a long arm pushing into Wales, made famous by Mike Oldfield when he named his second album after it. Mike Oldfield was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to Kington: up on the Ridge with his kites and at home in his farmhouse with – the thought of it still made Danny Thomas catch his breath – twenty guitars.

Danny had three guitars in his stone barn: two acoustics and a Les Paul. He’d sold his classic Strat last Christmas. Broke his heart, but they needed a new stove, and Greta had gone without too long. And Mike Oldfield was long gone now, and Danny was left sitting in his stone barn, riffing into the night and counting all them lost opportunities to get out of farming for ever.

‘No music, no,’ Jeremy said. ‘They was prob’ly laying low the first night.’

‘You reckon?’

In Danny’s experience, laying low wasn’t what they did.

‘It’s where the ole crow was hovering,’ Jeremy said. ‘Direc’ly over that van.’

Half-past six this morning, when the boy had phoned him.

‘Hippies,’ he’d said.

Not Danny’s favourite word. There hadn’t been any hippies for over thirty years, but folks in this area loved to hang on to the obsolete. And it was what they’d always called Danny himself. Danny Thomas? Bloody hippy. We all knows what he grows in Bryncot Dingle. If his ole man was alive it’d kill him dead.

Danny had turned off the toaster, lowered the volume on Wishbone Ash and sought some clarification. To some of the old farmers, a hippy was anybody not wearing a tweed cap, wellies and green waterproof trousers.

‘Ole van,’ Jeremy said, ‘with little windows at the top. And a minibus, with one of them funny stars painted on the side.’

‘Pentagram?’

‘Sort of thing.’

‘Just the two vehicles?’

‘Far’s I can see. Could be more in the trees.’

‘You en’t been down to check?’

Jeremy had said nothing. He wouldn’t have gone near, not even after dark when he was known to move around among the sheep and the cattle looking like a poacher, but in fact a guardian. Jeremy never lost a lamb to the fox; it was like he and the fox had come to an agreement.

Greta had come into the kitchen then, flip-flopping across the stained lino. Had on the old pink dressing gown, and there was purple under her eyes, and Danny thought about the stove her’d never asked for and how it wasn’t enough.

He sighed and waited on the phone, until Jeremy coughed and said, real tentative, ‘Only, I thought as how you might... you know?’

‘Aye, I know,’ Danny said.

It had been flattering at one time. When the New Age travellers used to turn up in force, back in the eighties and nineties, the local farmers had felt threatened by the sheer numbers, and it took the police a long time to get the necessary court orders to move them on. Danny had come into his own, then – a farmer who looked like a traveller and was into their music and understood their ways. One summer night, he’d taken his Les Paul and his littlest generator and the Crate mini-amp up to this travellers’ camp by Forest Inn and hung out there jamming till dawn with a bloke called Judas, from Nuneaton. Biggest bloody audience Danny ever had. He’d donated a drum of diesel for the buses and off they’d all trundled next day, no bother.

The farmers were well pleased, even Sebbie Dacre, bigtime magistrate, who’d been about to have the invaders dealt with. Might be a raggedy-haired druggy, Danny Thomas, but he had his priorities right when it come down to it: Danny the negotiator, Danny the diplomat. The hippy-whisperer, some bugger said one night in the Eagle in New Radnor. Not imagining for one moment that when Danny Thomas was up there jamming with the travellers, he’d been screaming inside, Take me with you! Please! Get me out of yere!

And things wasn’t all that bad, then. Nowadays, agriculture was a sick joke, gasping on the life-support of EC grants. Danny wasn’t hardly replacing stock, in the hope that something would come up. Prices were laughable, and he wasn’t even looking forward to the haymaking, which seemed pointless. He was letting the docks grow, and the thistles. He’d even started doing the National bloody Lottery, and that was totally despicable.

‘All right, give me quarter of an hour, boy.’ Danny turned to his wife. ‘Jeremy Berrows. Got travellers in his bottom field.’

‘You makes it sound like a disease,’ Gret said.

Danny smiled and went off to find his classic King Crimson T-shirt.

The problem was not that Jeremy was scared, just that he was plain shy and avoided the company of other men who were cynical about farming and treated their animals like a crop. Never had nothing to do with his neighbour, Sebbie Dacre, gentleman farmer and Master of the Middle Marches Hunt. Even after his mam left the farm, Jeremy ignored the pubs, and the livestock markets when he could. Everybody thought he was coming out of it when he hooked up with Mary Morson – nice-looking girl, solid farming family. Her and Jeremy, they’d go out together, into Kington, and they had the engagement ring from the jeweller’s there – Mary flashing it around, Jeremy proud as a peacock, if peacocks wore work shirts and baggy jeans.

The van was below them now, about seventy yards away, and Danny could see most of it – light blue, with bits of dark blue showing through on the roof. Hard to say what make it was – bit bigger than a Transit, sure to be. And quite old, so that would likely rule out foreign tourists who didn’t know no better than to camp on somebody’s ground. Foreign tourists had classy new camper vans and Winnebagos.

Jeremy was looking tense already, hunched up.

‘Tell you what,’ Danny said. ‘Why don’t I go down there, talk to the buggers on my own?’

It made sense. Jeremy looked grateful and his shoulders relaxed. Flag the dog, sensing a release of tension, lay down in the grass, panting, and Danny went down there on his own, into the dip where the bank was eroded. The stream at the bottom was almost dried up. The blossomy hedge hid the bypass, though not Stanner Rocks, and Danny could still see the faces on the rocks, and the dead giant. Way back, when he was doing acid, he’d once watched the giant’s head rotting into green slime. Jesus Christ, never again.

‘Hello there!’ Danny shouted.

Now he was close up, he could tell this wasn’t travellers in the New Age sense. The van might be old and have windows punched in the sides, but it was tidy, clean and looked-after, with nothing painted on it – no slogans, no pentagrams – and the windows had proper blinds. And it was the only vehicle here. Where was the minibus, then?

Danny stepped over a bunch of elder branches, neatly sawn and stacked and left to rot, on account of Jeremy never burned elder, which was the Devil’s wood and would bring you no luck.

‘Anybody about?’

He walked over to the van and peered inside the cab, remembering how, on his own farm one time, he’d found this car – posh car, BMW – tucked up against a field gate, with the engine running and a length of hose from the exhaust jammed in the window, and a man in a black suit in there, all pink-faced and well dead.

A wood pigeon came blundering out of the hedge, making as much racket as a bunch of yobs with baseball bats. Danny spun round, and saw that they were above him. Both of them.

A woman and a girl. They were standing on the bank, in full sun, and Danny Thomas could see them clearly, and they weren’t exactly what he’d been expecting.

‘How’re you?’ he said mildly. Was he a bit disappointed because they were so ordinary-looking, both in light-coloured tops and jeans and trainers? Because they wasn’t wild-haired creatures with tattoos and chains and rings in their lips?

‘Oh hell.’ The woman scrambled down. ‘I suppose we’re trespassing.’

Danny shrugged.

‘It was late,’ the woman said, ‘and we were exhausted. I’m sorry.’

Danny said, ‘Where’d the other one go?’

The woman blinked, shook out her dark brown hair. The girl came down and joined her, sticking close like Flag, the sheepdog, had with Jeremy. The girl looked about fourteen.

‘Minibus?’ Danny said. ‘Pentagram on the side?’

‘Oh, yeah, right.’ The woman had an English accent. ‘They’ve gone. They left early. What happened, we met them last night – a girl and two guys. We both pulled into this garage forecourt, only it was closed, and we were nearly out of fuel and it was getting dark and I’m like, Oh Christ, what are we going to do if they’re all closed? I mean, obviously I don’t know this area too well, and I couldn’t think of anywhere to stop for the night. Then this girl in the bus says, “Oh, we’ve been round here loads of times, we can show you a good campsite.” And that’s how we...’ She shrugged. ‘I’m sorry. I mean, it was dark and I— We didn’t light a fire or anything. We wouldn’t do anything like that. Is this your farm? Can I pay you?’

Danny became aware of Jeremy Berrows up on the bank.

Danny said. ‘It’s his farm, it is.’

‘Oh.’

He watched the woman approaching Jeremy. She was very thin and her bare arms were tanned. She was real sexy, in fact, in a more managed way, like a rock chick of the old school.

‘Hi, I’m, er... I’m Nat,’ she said. ‘Natalie. That’s Clancy.’

The girl nodded and said nothing.

Jeremy didn’t move at all, but he wasn’t still either. He was so much a part of this land that he seemed suspended in the air currents, and his sparse, fluffy hair was dusted by the sun. When the woman moved towards Jeremy, leaving the girl by the van, Danny would swear he saw a hell of a shiver go through the boy, as if there was a sudden stiff breeze, come out of nowhere, that no one else could feel.

Danny felt an apprehension.

For over a week, the blue van stayed in the bottom field.

Then it wasn’t there any more.

About a month after this, Gwilym Bufton, the feed dealer and gossipy bastard from Hundred House, told Danny Thomas that he’d seen a blue van parked up in Jeremy Berrows’s yard, hidden behind the old dairy. Like it was meant to be hidden.

By September, people were starting to talk.

In October, Danny saw Jeremy Berrows one lunchtime in the Eagle at New Radnor, sitting at a table in the shadows with the woman with dark brown hair. Jeremy nodded and said, ‘How’re you?’ in a nervous kind of voice, and Danny didn’t push it. The woman smiled at Danny, and it was a nice smile, no question, and she was a lovely-looking woman, no question about that either, but her eyes were watchful. Danny supposed he could understand that, the way people were talking.

Next thing he heard about the van was that it had been sold – bit of irony here – to the naturalists working up at Stanner, to use as a mobile site HQ and for overnight accommodation. Serious burning of boats here, in Danny’s view. Then he hears the woman’s gone to work for the latest London fantasists to take over the ruinous Stanner Hall Hotel. Manager, no less.

A few days later, Greta said, when they were watching telly, during the adverts, ‘Rhoda Morson – you know, Mary’s mother? Well, I was talking to her, in the paper shop, see, and her says, “Oh, he’s just doing it to make Mary jealous.” ’

‘You what?’

‘Her. Well, Rhoda Morson was mad as hell, sure t’ be, when Mary blew it with Jeremy and lost the farm. Getting his own back now, that’s what she reckons. Rubbing it in.’

‘That’s what her reckons, is it?’ Danny said. Lost the farm. Bloody hell, it was all they ever thought about – bringing another bloody farm into the family. Where was love in the equation, or was that a sixties thing?

Greta looked at him, thoughtful. ‘You could find out.’

‘Eh?’

‘How permanent it is.’

‘Why’d I wanner do that? En’t my affair.’

‘Ah, but is it?’ Greta said. ‘Is it just an affair? Or has that tart got her big feet firmly under the table? The girl’s going to school over at Moorfield now, ’cording to Lynne in the hairdresser’s. Now that’s got the ring of permanent about it, isn’t it?’

Danny yawned and watched a car commercial he liked because it had a soundtrack of ‘Travellin’ in Style’ by Free. He’d never had an actual car, only second-hand trucks. He didn’t mention to Greta about the van being sold; if she hadn’t heard, he wasn’t going to give her more gossip to spread across the valley.

‘You knows Jeremy Berrows better than most,’ she said. ‘You could find out.’

‘I prob’ly could, Gret,’ Danny said. ‘If I gave a shit.’

And the matter was never raised again, because that was the night of the terrible fire that wrecked Gomer Parry’s plant-hire depot down the valley, killing Gomer’s nephew, Fat Nev. Bit of a shock for everybody in Radnor Valley, that was, and Danny spent a lot of time helping poor old Gomer salvage what could be salvaged and restore what could be restored. Rebuilding the perimeter fence to keep out the scavengers and dealing with the particular area of the site that he realized Gomer couldn’t bear to go near.

And out of the blackened ruins of Gomer’s business came the glimmering of a new future for Danny. It wasn’t, admittedly, the career in music he’d always dreamed of, but it would mean whole days out of the valley. New places, new people. And he was a good ole boy, Gomer Parry.

For a while, Danny Thomas was so excited that, like the great David Crosby, he almost cut his hair.

He never saw much of Jeremy Berrows again until the winter, when the trees were all rusty and the skulls of Stanner Rocks gleamed with damp like cold sweat, and the traditional stability of the border country was very much called into question.

Traditional stability: that was a bloody joke.

Part One

It occurred to a man who was cycling home to Kington late at night – he’d been working at the munitions factory during the War. Near Hergest Court he saw this enormous hound which he’d never seen before and never saw again. The hound had huge eyes – that’s what impressed him most, the size of its eyes. The hound didn’t attack him, and he just kept cycling and I would imagine he cycled very fast. He had a feeling that there was something that just wasn’t real about it.

Bob Jenkins, journalist, Kington

1

Without the Song

NORMALLY, SHE WOULDN’T think of fogging the air around non-smoking parishioners, especially so soon after a service. Tonight was different. Tonight, Merrily needed not only this cigarette but what it was saying about her.

The cigarette said, This woman is human. This woman is weak. Also, given the alleged findings on secondary smoking, this woman is selfish and inconsiderate. This is a serial sinner.

Only it wasn’t getting through. Brenda Prosser’s eyes were glowing almost golden now. Twice she’d tried to sit down at the kitchen table and been pushed back to her feet by the electricity inside her. She had to hold on to the back of the chair to stop her hands trembling, and then the joy would make her mouth go slack and she’d shake her head, smiling helplessly.

‘Gone.’ Maybe the fourth time she’d said that – Brenda relishing the hard finality in the word: gone, gone, gone.

‘Just like it never was there, vicar,’ Big Jim Prosser said. His light grey suit was soaked and blackened across the shoulders. He stood with his back to the old Aga in the vicarage kitchen, and the Aga rumbled sourly.

And Merrily smoked and wondered how she should be responding. But the inner screen was blank. Just like Ann-Marie’s scan.

‘This is a miracle, sure t’be,’ Jim said.

Oh Christ. Any word but that.

‘And, see, like I kept saying to Jim, hardly the first one, is it?’ Rain was still bubbled on Brenda’s forehead like the remains of a born-again baptism. ‘Not the first since you brought back the Evensong.’

‘Without the song.’ Merrily sat down, then abruptly stood up again and went to fill the kettle for tea. A dense curtain of rain swished across the dark window over the sink, as though it had been hosed.

They could have waited for her in the church porch, Brenda and Jim. But when the congregation was filing out, umbrellas going up, there they’d been, standing among the wet tombs and the headstones, both of them bareheaded, as though they were unaware of the sometimes-sleety rain. Like they were in some parallel dimension where it wasn’t cold and it wasn’t raining at all.

The truth was, Jim had said, as they followed Merrily to the vicarage, that they didn’t want to talk to anyone else, didn’t want to answer all the obvious questions about Ann-Marie. They thought it was only right that the vicar should be the first to know.

This was the first time that either Jim or Brenda had been to the Sunday evening service. They’d been among those older parishioners who were huffily avoiding it because they’d heard it was all changed, had become a bit unconventional, a bit not for the likes of us.

‘I pray we’ll be forgiven for ever doubting what you were trying to do, Merrily,’ Brenda said now.

So much for the experiment in Mystery.

Evensong.

As in most parishes, the Sunday evening service had been killed a while ago, by falling congregations.

And then Merrily had suddenly brought it back. Sunday evening in the church. Everyone welcome. Just that. Nothing about a service.

The truth was that, after what had happened with Jenny Box, she’d been feeling guilty. Deliverance work had been separating her too often from her own parish, from the day-to-day cure of souls. She’d been too busy to notice the anomalous buds in the local flower bed until they were bursting into black blossom.

When she’d put this to the Bishop, he’d waved it away. Congregations were in free fall; it was a phase. Or it wasn’t a phase, but something truly sinister – the beginning of the end for organized Christianity. What about children? the Bishop asked; the new Archbishop of Canterbury was particularly worried about the absence of children in churches. Merrily had raised this issue with Jane, who seemed to have been a child like yesterday, and Jane had wrinkled her nose.

‘Who needs kids in church, anyway? Look at it this way – kids are not supposed to drink in pubs until they’re eighteen, so pubs are slightly mysterious... therefore cool. So like, obviously, the best way to invest in the future would be to ban the little sods from the church altogether. That way, they wouldn’t turn out like me.’

‘So the monthly Family Service, with kids doing readings, the quiz...’

‘Totally crap idea, I always said that. It just makes the Church look needy and pathetic. You have to cultivate the mystery. If you don’t bring back the mystery, you’re stuffed, Mum.’

It was worrying: increasingly these days the kid was making a disturbing kind of sense.

OK, then. When she brought back the service, she didn’t call it Evensong because there was no song. No hymns, no psalms. And no sermon, definitely no preaching. It was an experiment with Mystery.

She didn’t even call it a service. She didn’t wear the kit – no cassock, not even a dog collar after the first time – and she sat on a car cushion on the chancel steps. The heating, for what it was worth, would be on full, and pews were pulled out and angled into a semi-circle haloed by a wooden standard lamp that she’d liberated from the vestry. It was a quiet time, a low-key prelude to the working week. The first time, only four people had turned up, which partly dictated the form. Five weeks later, it was a congregation of around twenty, and growing, although congregation was hardly the word.

It would begin with tea and coffee and chat, turning into a discussion of people’s problems. Sometimes solutions were arrived at before the villagers went home. Small difficulties sorted: babysitters found, gardeners for old people. Sometimes it would quietly feed notions into the village, and issues would be resolved during the following week.

The church as forum, the church as catalyst. The polish-scented air as balm. How it should be.

And the Mystery.

As early as the third week, more personal issues had started to emerge. The ones you wouldn’t hear discussed on the street, certainly not by the people involved: marital problems, anxieties over illness and fears over kids and what they might be getting into. There was a surprising focus to these discussions, and when prayer came into it – as it usually did, in the end – it would happen spontaneously, rising like a ground mist in the nave.

Real prayer... and somehow this was a seal of confidentiality. None of the problems raised in the church and distilled into prayer had ever drifted back to Merrily as gossip.

She was elated. It had been cooking. What she didn’t need at this stage was anything boiling over into myth-making.

Jim and Brenda Prosser ran the Eight till Late in the centre of the village. Their daughter, Ann-Marie, who last summer had been painlessly divorced, had moved into the flat over the shop, helping out there at weekends before going off clubbing in Hereford, with her mates. Ann-Marie’s illness had been a rumour for some weeks. Pasted-on smiles at the checkout, whispers about tests. On a Sunday night two weeks ago, Alice Meek, who had the fish and chip shop in Old Barn Lane, had said, Brenda won’t talk about it, but it don’t look good. En’t there nothing we can do?

‘Alice,’ Brenda said now. ‘You know what Alice is like.’

‘Calls a spade a bloody ole shovel,’ Jim said.

‘We met Alice when we were coming back from Dr Kent’s house this afternoon, and she seemed to know.’

‘Only by your face, love,’ Jim said with affection.

The kettle began to hiss, and Merrily put tea in the pot. Brenda sat down at last. She was in her early sixties, had lost weight recently – no surprise there – and her bleach-blonde hair was fading back to white. Periodically, a hand trembled. Brenda folded both of them in her lap and stared across the refectory table at Merrily, like she was seeing the vicar in a strange new light.

‘Alice told us about the special prayers you had for Ann-Marie.’

‘Well, not—’ Merrily looked down at the table top. Of course it was special; all prayer should be special.

‘Alice said she lost track of time. She said she felt as if everybody there was together. United, you know? And that was also some of the newcomers she didn’t know. All united and they were part of something that was... bigger. Said she’d never known anything like that before. Alice said.’

Emotion had brought up the Welshness in Brenda’s voice. The Prossers had moved across from Brecon about fifteen years ago. Merrily felt flushed and uncertain. Happy, of course – happy for the Prossers and Ann-Marie. It was luminously wonderful, and she’d been conscious of reaching an unexpected level of conscious worship, but...

‘What did Dr Kent say exactly?’

‘He phoned for Ann-Marie just after lunch,’ Jim said. ‘He admitted he’d known since Friday, but he was afraid to say in case it was wrong. In case they’d somehow got the wrong medical records or whatever. He said he didn’t think it was possible the new tests had drawn a blank, couldn’t like get his head around it. So he was trying to get the consultant on the phone all of yesterday, and it wasn’t until this morning, see, when he managed to reach him at his home. Couldn’t believe it. Neither of them.’

‘He definitely confirmed that the scan was...’

‘Clear. Nothing there. And it was hers, no question of that. No mistake here, Merrily.’

‘What did the consultant say about it?’

Jim shrugged. ‘You know these fellers.’

‘Maybe they...’ Merrily bit her lip. Made a mistake the first time.

‘See, to be frank, Merrily, I’ve never been what you’d call a real churchgoer,’ Jim said. ‘I’m a local shopkeeper, struggling to stay in business. Sometimes I’ve come because it seemed to be expected.’

Brenda sat up. ‘Jim!’

‘No, let me say this. I want to. It’s like being a social drinker. I was a... how would you put it?’

‘Social worshipper?’ Merrily smiled. ‘That’s perilously close to martyrdom, Jim.’

‘What I’m trying to say...’ He’d reddened at last. ‘Well, if this isn’t a bloody miracle, Merrily, I wouldn’t recognize one, that’s all.’

Merrily tried to hold the smile. ‘Big word.’

Brenda said quickly, ‘Alice said you also prayed for Percy Joyce’s arthritis and—’

‘Yes, but that—’

‘And now he’s come off the steroids. You’re healing people, Merrily.’

The words echoed once, clearly in her head as the kettle began to scream and shake, and the kitchen lights seemed too bright.

‘I...’ Merrily ground her cigarette into the ashtray, twisting it from side to side. ‘Sometimes, God heals people.’

Sometimes. It was a crucial word, because most times people were not healed.

Big Jim said gently, ‘We understands that. But He do need asking the right way, don’t He? What I’m saying, Merrily... something happened during that service, to concentrate people’s minds on it. Something a bit powerful, sort of thing. It’s a new kind of service, and you’re a new kind of vicar. Not what we was used to. Alice is telling—’

Everybody, probably.

‘Where’s Ann-Marie now?’

Brenda smiled. ‘In the pub, I expect, with her friends. She’ll be coming to thank you, have no doubts about—’

‘No... look...’ Merrily stood up. ‘I’m really, really happy for her and for you, and it does seem like a miracle. But the body’s a wonderful thing, and sometimes... I’d just be really glad if you didn’t say too much about that aspect of it, for the moment. For the time being. Until—’

Until when, exactly?

‘We’ll go now,’ Jim said.

‘You haven’t had your tea. I’m sorry...’

‘We never wanted to embarrass you, Merrily,’ Brenda said.

Most weeks, Lol would pull the property section out of Prof’s Hereford Times and toss it on the pile of papers they kept for lighting the stoves.

Wood-burners in a recording studio? Prof had been unsure about this, but the punters liked it. When the sound of a log collapsing into ash had filtered like a sigh into the mix of the final acoustic song that the guitar legend Tom Storey had recorded here last week, Tom had refused to lose it. Tom, who’d left yesterday, was superstitious about these things.

Tonight, Prof would be working in here, tinkering with Tom’s music perhaps until dawn. About eight p.m., Lol went out to the wood-shelter and packed a pile of blocks into a big basket, brought the basket into the stable that now housed the studio and bent to build a fire in the second stove.

Sometimes his work here amounted to little more than domestic chores and working on his own material. Prof didn’t seem to mind that, but Lol did.

He was crumpling the property pages to take the kindling when he noticed a small photograph of a tiny, tilting house with a white door. He stood up and carried the paper to the light over the mixing desk.

LEDWARDINE

Church Street – exquisite small, terraced

house, Grade Two listed, close to the centre

of this sought-after village. Beamed

living room, kitchen, two bedrooms and

bathroom. Open green area and orchards

to rear. Must be viewed.

He stood for a while by the mixing desk, then he tore out the page, folded it and pushed it into a back pocket of his jeans. While he was packing the rest of the property section into the stove and adding twigs, he saw himself walking in through that white door. Draped over the post at the foot of the stairs was an old woollen poncho, then you went through into the low-beamed parlour. You sat down at Lucy’s desk in the window overlooking Church Street, with two lamps switched on. You heard a movement, looked over your shoulder and saw Jane Watkins, fifteen, standing in the doorway, and Jane said, desolately, I thought she would be here. I really didn’t think she’d left us for ever.

Lucy Devenish: honorary aunt to Jane, mentor to Lol. Lucy had introduced him to the inspirational seventeenth-century Herefordshire poet, Thomas Traherne, and, indirectly, to Jane’s mother, the Rev. Watkins.

Lucy in her poncho, face like an old Red Indian, voice like a duchess: You have to learn to open up. Let the world flow into you again.

He could still see Jane standing in the doorway that night at Lucy’s – Lucy not yet buried after dying in the road, hit and run. Jane standing in the doorway, confused, and a pink moon hanging outside. Jane talking about her mother: She does like you. I can tell. I think, the way things turned out, you probably did the best thing not actually sleeping with her. It will stand you in good stead.

Getting to sleep with Merrily had taken more than a year. A year in which Lol had turned away from music, taken a course in psychotherapy and then turned away in disgust from psychotherapy and gone back to the music.

But neither he nor Merrily was all that young any more. They lived over half an hour apart and their lives were very different, but every day when he didn’t see her seemed like a wasted day, and there was nothing like the music business for teaching you about passing time.

Lol struck a match and put it to the paper. Ledwardine. He’d been living there when they’d first met, but circumstances had moved him away. Now he wanted to go back. He wanted that house and everything it once had promised.

When the Prossers had gone, Merrily lit a cigarette, feeling leaden and ungracious. She was thinking, miserably, about healing.

Thinking about the corrupted Bible Belt evangelism of the former Radnor Valley minister, Father Nick Ellis. About an event called the Big Bible Fest she’d attended with a crowd of other students at theological college, where there’d been speaking in tongues and calls to the disabled to have faith and rise up out of those wheelchairs. And if they didn’t rise up then their faith wasn’t strong enough. Tough.

She thought about a girl called Heather Redfern – seventeen, Jane’s age – who, despite prayers in at least six churches, had died of leukaemia less than a month after leading a twenty-mile sponsored walk around the black and white villages of North Herefordshire to raise money for Macmillan nurses.

And she thought about Ann-Marie Herdman – dizzy, superficial, often seen swaying across the square at one a.m., towing some bloke up to the flat over the Eight till Late. Some bloke who, in the morning, she probably wouldn’t even recognize. Ann-Marie: a woman for whom the church gate was just a convenient place to wait for your lift into Hereford.

Healing was like the bloody National Lottery; the good guys rarely hit the jackpot.

Merrily stood up and went, without thinking, into the scullery. Because what you did now, you phoned your spiritual director.

Or you would do that, if your spiritual director wasn’t wrestling with his own crisis in a place far away where no mobile phones were permitted – a primitive monastic community, not in the mid-Wales wilderness but on a concrete estate south of Manchester, where the police would raid flats and find guns, a place Huw Owen described as like an open wound turning septic. More suited to his condition, he said, than bare hills safe and sanitized by wind and rain.

Huw was running hard from his all-too-human emotions. He’d lost a woman, the love of his mid-life, because of a man of unfathomable evil, and the all-too-human part of Huw had sought closure through revenge. And, although – maybe because – this man was dead, it hadn’t happened; there had been no closure, and Huw was terrified that his faith wasn’t sufficient to take him beyond that.

Merrily sat down at the desk, glimpsing a dispiriting image of her own faith as a small, nutlike core inside a protective shell: too small, too shrivelled, to absorb the concept of miracles.

Jane rang from the hotel, just before ten. The same Jane who should have been home by now.

‘Erm, I told Gomer I wouldn’t need a lift back tonight, OK?’

‘I see,’ Merrily said.

‘Don’t be like that. There’s no problem about going straight to school from here in the morning. As it happens, I’ve got the clobber in my case.’

‘How prescient of you, flower.’

‘It’s as well to be prepared, you’re always saying that. It looked like snow earlier. It comes down heavily up here, when it starts.’

‘Being at least seven miles closer to the Arctic Circle.’

Jane’s weekend job had altered the format of both their lives. It was good that she had a job, not so good that it involved overnights on Saturdays, because all they had left, then, was Sunday, Merrily’s Working Day. Which left Sunday night, and now that was gone, too.

And it was the fact that Jane was working in a hotel and spending nights there. This was really stupid, but Merrily kept thinking about Donna Furlowe, daughter of the woman Huw Owen had loved. At Jane’s age, maybe a little older, Donna had been working at a hotel – holiday job – and had gone missing and been found murdered, possibly one of the Cromwell Street killings. Of course that was in Gloucestershire and this was on the edge of Herefordshire, where it hardened into Wales. It wasn’t even a coincidence, just paranoia.

‘You all right, Mum?’

‘Why do you want to stay there?’ It came out sharper than she’d intended. ‘Sorry. Do they want you to stay?’

‘They could use the extra help, yeah.’

‘Mmm.’ It was wise, in this kind of situation, not to ask too many questions, to convey the illusion of trust.

‘Of course, if you’re lonely,’ Jane said insouciantly, ‘you could always give Lol a ring.’

‘Jane—’

‘Oh no, it’s Sunday, isn’t it? Mustn’t risk having a man seen sneaking into the vicarage... on a Sunday. And not leaving until – wooooh – Monday.’

Merrily said nothing.

‘When are you two going to, like, grow up?’ Jane said.

2

Game Afoot

AND LEFT HER there... her lifeblood oozing into the rug.

Pausing for a moment, lean and elegant in his black suit, he stared right through the faces watching him out of the shadows. The table lamp with the frosted globe put shards of ice into his eyes. Oh my God, a woman whispered.

Jane was thinking, Grown people.

Now he was spinning back, sighting down his nose at the man in the wing-backed, brocaded chair. And the man was shifting uncomfortably. And the stiff white cuffs were chafing Janes wrists.

... And then you crept up to your room and waited until the entire household was silent. What time would that have been? Midnight? A quarter-past? Yes, let us say a quarter-past twelve-seventeen being the precise time of the full moon... which I suspect would appeal to your sense of drama.

With the log fire down to embers, the globe-shaded oil lamp was the only light in the drawing room, more shiveringly alive than electricity, spraying complex shadows up the oak panels. Jane dropped her resistance. She was part of the whole scam now, anyway.

Piffle, said the man in the wing-backed chair.

Oh, I think not, Major. I think that, barely half an hour after the murder, you crept back down the stairs and into the study, where you began to overturn chairs and pull out drawers, making as much noise as you possibly could. Finally, with the handle of your stick, you smashed not one, but two windows, in swift succession, so that the sound might be mistaken for a single impact.

Sir, your imagination is, I would suggest, even more hysterical than your abominable fiddle-playing.

A thin hand disdainfully flicked away the insult. And then you moved silently, up the stairs this time, and immediately re-emerged onto the main landing, dragging on your dressing gown, shouting and spluttering.