forgetting — it’s Christmas. Come in if you want.’
‘What happens?’
‘Well, it won’t be an ordinary midnight mass. In view of everything, I think she’ll be playing it by ear.’
‘I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been to one. I mean… you know…’ Gregory shrugged awkwardly ‘… why?’
‘You don’t believe in anything?’
‘Never thought about it. Wassa point? It don’t get you anywhere, do it?’
‘You don’t think it’s, like… interesting to think there might be something, somewhere, bigger than all this?’
‘Like what?’
‘Like, you know, a life beyond this life? Somewhere you go after you die?’
‘Best thing is not to die. Let other people do it.’
‘Huh?’
‘The dying,’ Gregory said roughly. ‘The trick is to let other people do the dying.’
CHRISTMAS DAY
Shall dumpish melancholy spoil my joys…
64
Sickness
‘We have to try and hold this together,’ Merrily said.
Standing on the chancel steps, in jeans, a black woollen top, her heaviest pectoral cross.
No mass, no meditation, but the church was full. It was almost eerily full, as if there’d been a timeslip back to medieval days, when the timbers of Ledwardine were young. When life was simpler and faith, out of a kind of necessity, was strong.
And when, as each new comet was sighted, they’d still talked about the Endtime.
She saw Jim Prosser and Brenda sitting with Brian Clee. In the Bull pew, James Bull-Davies with Alison. Maybe fifty local people and as many strangers. She saw the man with the ruby earring. She saw the witch from Dinedor who’d had visions of the Druids along the Serpent.
Edna Huws was at the organ. A good thing for her, perhaps, and for all of them. There would be carols. There would have to be carols, voices raised against the dark.
There was no sign of Shirley West.
‘No point in dressing this up,’ Merrily said. ‘A man’s been found drowned at the bottom of the pitch in Old Barn Lane. A man I’d got to know… if not well.’
Or not well enough soon enough.
‘The police are on their way. And, erm… they may need to come in here. Which limits us a bit.’
Murmurs. Merrily looked down and saw she was still wearing wellies. She wanted to get them to pray in silence for what remained of the spirit of Christmas, some small, still light, to come into this place. But there wasn’t much silence in her head.
She’d called Bliss back on her mobile. Listening, while walking over to the church with Lol, to his theory that Clem Ayling had been murdered by contract. A connection with the non-democratic focus group Hereforward, to which Ayling had been co-opted by the county council. Ayling discovering that his colleagues on Hereforward had been indulging themselves, on weekends away, with cocaine supplied by a man called Steven Furneaux.
Merrily hadn’t needed reminding why Ayling would have found the drug element particularly repugnant. Unfortunately, he’d thought he could deal with it himself, underestimating what other interests were at stake.
Sensing a connection, she’d told him about Blore’s report on the stones.
If Bliss was right, Ayling’s death was not directly connected with the Dinedor Serpent but meant to deflect the investigation in that direction. Discrediting opponents of the development of Dinedor and Rotherwas, as well, presumably, as the Coleman’s Meadow Preservation Society. Making it look like Herefordshire was home to some obsessive semi-pagan underculture.
Well represented, it seemed, in this congregation.
‘This was going to be a meditation,’ Merrily said. ‘That was when I was only expecting about a third as many people and no police. We were going to sit around in a circle and think about what it means — Christmas. Birth and rebirth. The coming of the light.’
Aware of the green curtain behind her, which had been hung over the smashed area of the rood screen, and the roughly sawn square of hardboard fitted into the stonework over the bottom quarter of the broken stained-glass window.
It was making her think about Clem Ayling’s head, the pieces of quartz, the body in the Wye.
‘I’ve been realising that sometimes we have to fight for the light. Whether it’s the midsummer sun rising over Cole Hill or the moonlight shining in the Dinedor Serpent.’
Somebody cheered and got shushed. Merrily smiled.
‘And it’s not paganism in the heathen sense, it’s paganism in the original sense. Ruralism. It’s an understanding that people living here thousands of years ago had different ways of perceiving God, but it always came back to light. We have the advantage because, thanks to what happened on this day over two thousand years ago, we also know about the higher levels of love.’
She looked up, heard the latch lifting on the church doors and saw five people heading towards the vestry. All of them, except Bliss, were women. One was Jane, who’d been waiting in the porch, one a uniformed policewoman. The third woman was Leonora Stooke and the fourth — oh hell — Annie Howe? The Ice Maiden?
They stood either side of the vestry door, waiting.
They didn’t have the key.
‘I’d like us to pray for that light and that love. And then — with the help of the unstoppable, heroic Miss Edna Huws, whose home, as most of you know, was flooded tonight, we’ll have some carols. During which I may have to pop out.’
It was a difficult situation. She couldn’t prolong the agony for Leonora Stooke, waiting to identify her drowned husband.
She abbreviated the prayer, busking it. Leaving fifteen seconds of silence before giving Edna the nod.
The vestry was sometimes a gift shop now. Money-raising scheme of Uncle Ted’s. Displays of postcards and booklets, notelets and framed prints had been pushed back against the walls. Elliot Stooke’s body lay on the trestle table under the dark, leaded window. It was still covered with the blue plastic, a big, shiny cocoon. The room smelled dank and sour.
Annie Howe was wearing a long off-white mac and a scarf. She’d nodded briefly at Merrily.
‘Take your time, Mrs Stooke. Tell me when you’re ready.’
Leonora was wearing her turquoise Gore Tex jacket. She was pale and somehow beautiful in her distress.
‘I can’t. I just—’ She looked across at Merrily, her red hair tumbled, her eyes glassy. ‘Why can’t
