To Dream of the Dead

for help. But I shall be cool, Jane, I shall make inquiries.’

‘What about Mad Shirley?’

‘And I’ll talk to Mad Shirley. As Huw points out, no need to approach her on behalf of the Stookes. Now she’s telling everybody I’m not a fit person to be the vicar, it’s… personal.’

‘Take her down, Mum.’

‘Yeah, and then I’ll get on the phone and blast the cops for not returning my computer. God, it doesn’t feel like Christmas, does it?’ Merrily finished her tea and stood up. ‘I’m just going to pop over to the shop before it gets crowded. Nearly out of cigs.’

‘What about breakfast?’

‘You and Eirion get something decent. I’ll just have toast and Marmite or something when I get back.’ She grabbed her waxed coat from the peg behind the kitchen door. ‘Won’t be long.’

Eirion had come down in expectation of central heating, gone back for a fleece, still looked cold. Pampered rich kid. Jane moved away from the sink, picked up a towel to dry her hands.

‘She’s annoyed with herself for letting things slide. I’ve seen this before. She needs to walk around the square a couple of times, smoke a cigarette, gear herself up.’

‘Something happened I don’t know about?’ Eirion said. ‘I mean apart from us being cut off until January?’

‘Some people are messing her about, that’s all.’

Jane felt suddenly depressed. Everything seemed so… cheesy.

‘She’s so… not like a vicar, your mother, isn’t she?’ Eirion poured grapefruit juice into a glass. ‘Not like you think of vicars. Especially women. Not what you expect.’

‘What — like they don’t smoke, don’t swear? Don’t sleep with the bloke across the street?’

‘She doesn’t make you go…’ Eirion wiggled his fingers like he was getting rid of something cloying. ‘In a strange way, she’s more human than the rest of us. Forget it, I don’t know what I’m talking about.’

‘It is odd, actually,’ Jane said. ‘I think it’s something about deliverance people. Something that makes them dispense with the bullshit. I don’t quite understand it either.’ She looked over to the window. ‘I wonder if Blore’s going to be back on the site.’

‘They’ll surely be going home for… See, I was about to say Christmas, but he doesn’t do Christmas, does he?’

‘The TV crew won’t be able to get all their stuff out. Unless they moved some of it last night after dark. But then, if the bridge went down around seven…’

‘Maybe they’ll have vans the other side and carry what they can across the footbridge.’

‘We should check it out, all the same. I more or less promised Coops.’

‘Your mum might be right, you know,’ Eirion said. ‘Blore might’ve found nothing. And Cooper’s just embittered because they didn’t give him control of—what?’

Jane had walked over, put her arms around him. She felt a bit tearful.

‘We’re destroying your Christmas, aren’t we?’

Eirion smiled sadly, running a hand down Jane’s hair.

‘So far, it’s the best Christmas I’ve ever had.’

‘Ah. Right.’ Jane looked up at him, solemn. ‘Just for a minute, I forgot you were Welsh.’

Dodging neatly away, grinning, clapping her hands and then, as Eirion chased her round the table, snatching an apple from the bowl and throwing it at him. Eirion caught the apple, tossing it from hand to hand, as a vague smear of sun in the high window opened up this white fan of light in the room.

Jane stopped, catching her breath.

‘Jane…?’

‘Lucy.’

Jane sat down. Eirion did his wry smile, but his eyes were wary. He put the apple on the table.

‘It was just something coming back to me.’

As clear as reality. As clear as if it had been Lucy who’d caught the apple, and Jane was back in the old shop, Ledwardine Lore, the day they cut an apple in half, sideways. Not, as you normally did, through the stalk. She remembered Lucy holding out a half in each hand.

There… what do you see?

And Jane had seen, for the first time, the slender green lines and dots in the centre of the apple which formed a five-pointed star. The pentagram that lay at the heart of every apple but which you only discovered if you cut through it sideways, which people seldom did. The hidden magic in the everyday. Lucy saying, Forget all this black magic nonsense. The pentagram’s a very ancient symbol of purification and protection.

‘I think something’s staring us in the face,’ Jane said.

As if, in that momentary lifting of the spirits, when she’d ducked away from Eirion, picked up the apple, something had opened up for her, like two halves of an idea she couldn’t yet put together.

Let no one talk of the humble apple to me, Lucy had said.

Jane sat down. She felt slightly dizzy. Nothing was quite real.

‘Irene, could you…?’

‘Anything.’

‘If Lol has to go out with Gomer again? Like his hands…?’

‘I’ll help,’ Eirion said. ‘If Gomer will accept me.’

‘And tell Lol not to play “Fruit Tree” tonight.’

Most of the village was lying low. Many people had been up late talking in the street, half anxious, half excited, about the implications. Some of them driving out to see the bridge, just to make sure. Lights still burned here and there in the greyness, shimmered in the dark water, but only James Bull-Davies and Gomer Parry were to be seen, at the top of the square, leaning against Gomer’s jeep.

‘Long ole night, vicar.’

‘I don’t know how you do it, Gomer.’

He looked scarily happy. Shirley West would be seeing the Devil’s light in his bottle glasses.

‘Don’t need much sleep these days, see. Done all my growin’ and never had much in the way of beauty.’ He stood looking down the street, rolling a cig. ‘Dunno what’s left for us to do with the ole river, but I reckon our commander-in-chief yere’ll have a few ideas.’

‘Well, we can’t build a new bloody bridge,’ James said. ‘Not even you.’

‘Erm…’ Merrily sank her hands into her coat pockets. ‘Can I ask you guys something? In confidence.’

‘Ask away,’ Gomer said. ‘Like the ole poet said, What is this life if, full of care, we en’t got time for the little vicar?’

‘Cole Barn. What’s the history? It did belong to your family at one time didn’t it, James?’

‘Gord, vicar, way back everything belonged to my blessed family. Barn itself, no. Ground it’s built on, yes — sorry, said I’d check if there was any mention of stones. No there wasn’t but the Bulls weren’t exactly of an antiquarian bent. If the stones were in the way, they’d’ve buried them or smashed them up and that would’ve been that.’

‘When did your family last own the land?’

‘Cole Farm was… finally sold, I think, in the 1900s, to Albert Evans, family’s estate manager at the time. Inherited by his eldest daughter who’d married into the Pole family, and then finally — as you know — left by Margaret Pole to Gerry Murray, who’s now in with Pierce and capitalises on his inheritance by flogging the barn to the Frenchies.’

‘Any gossip about it?’

‘Sort of gossip?’

‘Erm… my sort of gossip.’

He took it well. Didn’t blink. He had, after all, been a soldier.

‘Not that I’ve ever heard. Called Cole Barn on the sales particulars, but Albert Evans built it as a house, for his retirement. Meant his eldest could move into the existing farmhouse with his family. Didn’t live there very long, though, Albert. Moved down to the village, for convenience. House was eventually gutted, became a cattle shed. That’s it, really.’