To Dream of the Dead

Meanwhile, you know, stroll around if you’d like to. Check us out.’

‘I’ll do that.’ Mr Winterson moved away from the path, turning to Merrily. ‘Sorry about that. Must’ve sounded like one of these awful city types who move in and then start complaining about the cock crowing and the church bells.’

He took off his hat. He didn’t have a beard and his greying hair was short. He was nowhere near eighteen stone. His smile was rueful. ‘Elliot Winterson.’ He put out his hand. ‘You look absolutely soaked.’

‘I’m getting used to it. Merrily Watkins.’ She shook his hand; it wasn’t limp and it wasn’t cold. ‘TV guys, huh?’

‘Think they walk on water. I was a journalist for years — print journalist, scum of the earth, you know? While the TV boys are personalities. And don’t they know it. I mean, did you hear that? Offer the neighbours a chance to be on the box and watch all their complaints melt away. I’m sure it never bloody fails.’

He looked at her. She found she’d opened her coat, exposing the dog collar, like you brought out the big cross and the sprig of garlic.

‘Ah.’ He didn’t look fazed. ‘Yeah, I thought I’d heard the name. Did I see you at the meeting the other night?’

‘But not in uniform.’

Merrily was trying not to stare at him. Black fleece and grey trousers. His hair looked as if it was growing back after being shaved tight to the skull. The beard stubble was younger, maybe two days’ worth, making a mauvish circle around his entirely friendly white smile.

‘Quite interesting,’ he said, ‘the way people were divided over this dig.’

‘Not so much the dig as what happens afterwards,’ Merrily said. ‘Whether the stones get re-erected in situ.’

‘We certainly felt as if we were intruding on a family dispute.’

‘Pretty dysfunctional family.’

‘All communities are. Who was that woman who thought they represented satanic evil?’

‘Our postmistress.’

‘Member of your church?’

‘She comes to services, but I think she finds me a bit disappointing.’

He laughed. He looked relaxed now — more relaxed than Merrily felt. So much for the reprieve. A van drew into the field from the lane. A white van with a grey cromlech symbol on the side, the word Capstone across its lintel.

‘So you, erm, don’t really like it here, Mr Winterson?’

‘Elliot. No, look, it — the village itself is perfectly pleasant and unexpectedly civilised — nice pub and that bistro place. It’s just — you don’t think they’ll have great big floodlights at night, do you?’

‘Hard to say. I don’t know much about archaeology.’

‘Me neither. Shall we have a walk around? You can spare ten minutes, surely. I feel safer with the vicar.’

Huh? Another line from The Hole in the Sky came back at her, the kind that lingered, smarting, like your arm after an inoculation.

… the pathos of the modern-day clergy. These sad, vacant players in a dated masquerade.

‘Someone local, anyway,’ he said. ‘My wife — have you met my wife?’

‘I think my daughter did.’

‘Ah yeah. Jane? Jane who started all this. Jane who we have to blame.’

Two men were taking something that looked like a complicated Zimmer frame from the back of the van.

‘She’s eighteen,’ Merrily said. ‘She’s hoping to become an archaeologist.’

‘Seems to have made an impressive start. She told my wife about her… visionary experience.’

‘You don’t sound convinced.’

‘She’s…’ he shrugged, the rueful smile again ‘… young.’

‘It did lead, eventually, to the discovery of the buried stones.’

‘Yes.’ His eyes didn’t flicker. ‘My wife’s hoping to shoot a photo-sequence for the Independent when they get going.’ He smiled. ‘I suppose, now I’ve made myself into a possible thorn in their side — a potentially difficult person — these chaps’ll be more inclined to give Lenni access, to keep me happy. Not that that was any kind of strategy, you understand. Can we see any of these famous stones yet?’

‘They had at least one virtually exposed,’ Merrily said. ‘I’m not sure how big it was, but it looks like they’ve covered it over again. Probably because of the weather. There are at least another two, apparently, but I’m not sure where exactly.’

They walked down from the ridge towards the unturfed area, where a young woman was pacing something out between two khaki-coloured tents. You could see where the turf had already been removed in stripes, two orange-coloured mini-JCBs facing one another like adolescent dinosaurs squaring up for a fight.

‘So what do you do, Elliot?’

‘Me?’

‘You told the TV guy you were here to work.’

‘Ah.’ He grinned. ‘Bit of an exaggeration, I’m afraid. I’m on a sort of self-imposed sabbatical. I was working in America when my father died suddenly, leaving—’

‘Oh, I’m—’

‘Leaving me with a lot to sort out.’ Waving away the sympathy. ‘And enough money to buy time to consider exactly where we wanted to be.’ He grimaced. ‘Back in London, frankly, might’ve been quieter, but my wife… perhaps she’ll get the country out of her system. Or perhaps I’ll get used to it. I’m… looking at a few ideas for books. Nothing I feel confident enough to talk about yet. I’m sorry, that sounds a bit…’

‘I wasn’t prying.’

‘No, really, you have every right to pry. It’s not fair arriving somewhere being mysterious. People want to know. People need to know. Mystery wastes everyone’s time.’ He glanced at her, little smile. ‘And, er… I gather from my wife that you’re not just a vicar.’

‘Nobody’s just anything, Mr Winterson.’

‘Suppose you don’t like talking about it. Understandable.’

‘No,’ Merrily said. ‘Not at all. It’s usually more a case of people who don’t like asking me about it. Think I must be a bit weird.’

‘Surely not,’ Mathew Stooke said.

She could almost see the hot coals being laid out for her to walk along. There were, of course, ways of explaining Deliverance that even an atheist would buy… almost.

She was thinking about Nigel Saltash, the consultant psychiatrist introduced by Canon Sian Callaghan-Clarke to help modernise Hereford’s deliverance module. Saltash with his trim beard, his sports car and his undisguised disdain for the paranormal, which you could very plausibly translate into terms like mental imbalance and psychological projection and then go on to discuss the many forms of schizophrenia. On the other hand, that was the coward’s way out, and Nigel Saltash hadn’t lasted the course.

‘Well, somebody has to do it,’ Merrily said.

‘Really.’

‘At least one person in every diocese, sometimes a group or a panel. We’re very aware of the need to avoid sensationalism, which is one reason it isn’t talked about much.’

‘People gossip, though. I mean locally.’

‘Sometimes.’

‘Perhaps because you’re not exactly the archetypal exorcist, are you?’

‘Big hat and a black bag? That would be the Jesuits. In the movies.’