censer.
Merrily had spent an hour underlining passages in Revelations of Divine Love. Normally on a Monday afternoon, she’d have driven into Hereford to go through the deliverance diary with Sophie, but the Monday before Easter was for planning and organizing the weekend ahead.
There was also a parish council meeting on Wednesday. Uncle Ted, senior churchwarden, had a proposal to create a permanent cafe in the church. Turn it into the heart of the village again, he said. Also make some money. So what would happen to the silence? Where would you go when you needed to be alone with something that didn’t judge, didn’t question, didn’t ask you if you wanted to buy a raffle ticket?
Merrily looked up, out of the scullery window at the lesions in the sky. The sky was momentarily blurred. Maybe she needed glasses. A middle-age thing. It would come, sooner rather than later. Now she had an adult daughter. God…
The phone rang. She shut her eyes for a second before picking up.
‘All right, lass?’
‘Fine, thanks.’
Hadn’t spoken to him since Saturday morning. A sparse breakfast, just the two of them, Syd Spicer having left silently before first light, as they’d both known he would.
‘Just had a call.’
‘What did he want?’
Merrily watched the daffodils still huddled in their buds. You didn’t have to be psychic.
‘He’s laughing. “Huwie,” he says, “just a slight problem here, mate, a mere technicality…”’
‘A mere technicality. He said that?’
‘And laughed.’
She could hear the laughter. It would be artificial. She felt for a cigarette, still staring out of the window. Under the winter-bleached church wall, banks of snowdrops were only now beginning to droop next to the emerging daffs.
‘And what was the technicality?’
‘If a man feels… let’s say oppressed by the perceived proximity of someone who’s passed on, someone who, in life, was known to him but who was, shall we say, a flawed person, how is it best to get this presence off the premises?’
‘Requiem eucharist? You might expect him to know that.’
‘He said there could be complications. Here comes the technicality. He suspects there could be what he describes as strongly negative energy behind the manifestations.’
‘Plural?’
‘Plural, aye. Suggests a chronic case.’
‘Is this one of his, erm, flock?’
‘Declines to be specific. But why else the secrecy? I reminded him I wasn’t his spiritual director. I said Hereford Diocese wasn’t my patch, I said he needed to talk to somebody else.’
‘And he said…?’
‘He said he thought that when you were describing the case of Mr Joy you hadn’t finished the story. He wanted to know what nobody else had the nous to ask about. What you did afterwards to keep Mr Joy out of your life.’
‘I see. That negative.’
‘Cry for help, Merrily.’
‘If that’s a cry for help, it’s pitched too high for my hearing. Look…’ She pulled the last cigarette out of the packet. ‘I was new to it then. I was very scared. I’d listened to an old wives’ tale from an old woman who’d dabbled in areas I was supposed to abhor, and…’
‘And it worked.’
‘Something worked. Well… so far.’
‘It worked because you did it in the right spirit.’
‘You could argue…’ Merrily stared at the church wall, with all its lichens and life forms ‘… that the right spirit would be not to have done it at all. The purer soul does it with considered prayer. This was… something else.’
The cold finger was on Merrily’s spine. Up sprang the spidery figure of a creepy old woman in a care home whose name was Anthea but who only answered to Athena.
‘And you told him, did you?’
‘What I knew of it. Threw in a couple of defensive penta-grams, point up. See what reaction I got to that. He said nowt, seemed to be writing it down.’
Merrily remembered discussing Athena’s advice with Huw afterwards. How it bordered on what Jane would call magical ritual, and Huw had asked her if she realized how many so-called magical rituals had come out of the medieval Catholic Church.
She wondered if Syd had noted what she’d told Huw’s students about not necessarily analysing everything in depth.
That’s why we have the rituals and the liturgy… just do it.
Still not sure how true that was.
‘How does this feel to you?’ Merrily asked.
‘Feels wobbly. Temporary. I don’t like it, but if the bugger won’t come clean…’
‘It’s personal, isn’t it? It’s him.’
‘Or connected to him.’
‘Is he going to come back to you afterwards? Tell you – man to man – if it worked? Because he isn’t going to come to me, is he?’
‘Happen you should smother your pride and give him a call.’
‘I haven’t got his new number.’
‘I have it here,’ Huw said. ‘Give him a day or so, then call him. I think it were bloody hard for him to give away much as he did. I reckon he’s in a bad way.’
‘Thanks,’ Merrily said.
13
The core squad, in the CID room in front of the box. All the blinds up on a heavyweight early-evening sky. A gathering dismay in the room. Bliss howling.
‘What are these bastards trying to do? It’s like it’s been orchestrated.’
He’d come in halfway through the replay of the national news. He sat down, shaken.
‘How far it was planned is of no great importance at the present time,’ Annie Howe said. ‘It’s happening, and we need to respond to it.’
Annie had returned in a rare sparkling mood, the Worcester jury having come back unexpectedly with a nice result: two out of three guilty on the stabbing. The DCI’s fizz had survived the national TV news, but the extended version on Midlands Today was something else.
‘… poisoned our towns.’
On the screen, some fat bastard bulging out of his tweeds. ‘… and now it’s overflowing into rural areas. All the time, we see strangers in old vans, clearly up to no good, but we know we’re wasting our time reporting it, because it’ll be ignored… simply ignored.’
Cut to camel-coat-and-headscarf woman by a five-barred gate.
‘ Obvious why they don’t care. Coming out here’s jolly time-consuming, and everybody knows they can meet their arrest and conviction targets far quicker and more cheaply in the towns.’
‘Trouble is, she’s not far wrong there, is she?’ Bliss said.
‘Though we won’t be expressing those sentiments outside of this room, will we, Francis?’ Annie Howe said
