‘There a funeral tea up the hall?’ he asked Greg.
‘If there is, we weren’t asked to provide it. Nah, they say Father Ellis don’t go for eating and drinking in church.’
‘It’s a bloody village hall!’
‘Not when he’s there it ain’t.’
Gomer looked over his shoulder at Greg polishing glasses for the customers that didn’t come in. ‘You’re not a churchgoer, then, boy?’
‘Never was. But the bloody pressure’s on now.’ The anxious look flitted across Greg’s face again. ‘Lot of people’ve started going. He don’t look much, Ellis, but they reckon you come out feeling on cloud nine. I mean, whatever it is, I’m not sure I wanna catch it. The wife’s gone to this funeral. And I let ’em use the car park – all his fans from miles around. Not that many of ’em drop in for a pint or anyfing afterwards. Don’t need drink when you’re high on God.’
‘You got a few yere now, boy,’ Gomer observed. ‘Stand by your pumps.’
Two men and three women came in, all in black. One of the men was Tony Probert, farmer from Evenjobb – Gomer knew him to speak to, just about – and one of the women was...
‘Gomer Parry!’
‘Greta,’ Gomer said, ‘’ow’re you?’
Greta Thomas, wife of Danny, the rock-and-roll farmer from Kinnerton. She was little and busty, with a voice Nash Rocks could’ve used for blasting. Used to be receptionist for Dr Coll.
‘I hope you’re lookin’ after yourself, Gomer,’ Greta yelled. ‘Not goin’ back to the wild?’ Never one to make a meal of the ole condolences; once the funeral was over Greta believed it was time to start cheering you up.
‘I’m doing fine, Gret.’
‘’Cause if Min thought you was on the bevvy...’
‘Moderation in all things, you know me, girl. I dunno, I seen bloody Danny earlier, he never said you was goin’ to see Menna off.’
‘Never remembers nothing, ’cept his bloody chords. Tony and Julie was coming, so I had a lift.’ Greta pulled Gomer towards a table. ‘Reckoned
‘Nothin’ to do with wantin’ to see the famous Reverend Ellis in action without goin’ to a reg’lar service, like?’
Greta looked sheepish. ‘No harm in that, is there?’
‘Worth it, was it?’
‘Well... strange, it is, actually, Gomer.’
‘Ar?’
‘Specially the funny singing. Like a trance – beautiful really, when it gets going. The voices are like harmonizing natural, the men and the women. Really gets you. It’s quite... I don’t know... sexy. That’s a stupid thing to say, ennit?’
‘Better get you a drink, Gret.’
He went to Greg at the bar, bought Greta a brandy. He might learn something here, and it beat going home to an empty bungalow with no fire, no tea, nothing but crap Saturday night telly and then a cold bed.
Greta looked up at him from under a fringe of hair dyed the colour of Hereford clay.
‘I didn’t mean that how it sounded, Gomer. I mean, I’ve never been that religious, but it makes you think. A lot of people’s saying that. Dr Coll – even Dr Coll – reckons Mr Ellis is the best thing ever happened to this area.’
‘Why do he reckon that?’ Clergy, in Gomer’s experience, came and went and never got noticed much, unless they started messing with people’s wives – or they were little and pretty.
‘The way it’s bringing the community together,’ Greta said. ‘You’d never get that with an ordinary parson and an ordinary church. When did you ever see local people and folk from Off hugging each other?’
‘En’t natural,’ Gomer conceded.
‘And they also reckons you can get a private consultation.’
‘What for?’
‘Anything, really. Sickness, emotional problems...’
‘What’s he do for that?’
‘Fetches them out of you, Gomer. Lays his hands on you, fetches it all out.’
‘Bloody hell, Gret.’
‘There’s folk swears by it.’
‘Bloody hell.’
He leaned back and thought for a bit. Doctor’s receptionist for what – ten years? Her’d have been no more than a young girl when her first went to work for Dr Coll’s old feller. Still...
‘How well did you actually know Menna Thomas, Gret?’
Doctors’ receptionists, it was easier for them to talk about the dead than the living, and Greta Thomas was still talking when Tony Probert and his wife and the other couple had finished up their drinks and looked a bit restive, so Gomer told them it was OK, he’d take Greta home himself.
On the way, he said, ‘And how well did you know her sister Barbara?’
Which was how he found out the truth about the hydatid cyst.
Behind the hearse came an old-fashioned taxi, like a London black cab. Merrily saw brake lights come on about a hundred yards down the lane and she moved quietly towards them. Stone posts stood stark against the last of the light and she heard the grating of metal gates.
Silhouettes now. Someone in a long overcoat pushing a bier. Merrily watched the coffin sliding onto it under the raised tailgate of the hearse, saw the bier pushed through the gates. It was followed by several people fused into one moving shadow.
Against the band of light below the grey roller blind of evening, she could see the roof of the old rectory. No lights on there. The taxi started up, rolled away down the lane. No sign of another car.
No sign of Barbara Buckingham.
Suppose Barbara had accosted Weal, made a nuisance of herself, and Weal – as a solicitor, able to expedite these things – had responded with some kind of injunction to restrain her. In which case, why hadn’t Barbara told Merrily? Why hadn’t she left a message?
At the gates, peering down an alley of laurels, Merrily was pulled sharply back by the realization that this whole situation was entirely ridiculous. Only Jane would do something like this. But then more headlights were glaring around the bend behind her, and she slipped inside the gates to avoid them.
The vehicle went past on full beams: not Sophie’s Saab but a fat four-wheel drive with two men in it. Leaving Merrily standing on the property of J.W. Weal as, somewhere beyond the laurels, a single warm light was anointing the bruised dusk with an amber balm.
She followed the laurel alley towards the house, now only half expecting the dramatic eleventh-hour appearance of Barbara Buckingham like the dissenting wedding guest with just cause for stopping the service.
By the house, the drive split into a fork, one prong ending at a concrete double garage, the other dropping down a step and narrowing into a path, its tarmac surface fragmenting into crazy paving to cross the lawn – which was wedge-shaped and bordered by spruce and Scots pine. At the narrow end of this wedge stood a conical building, the source of the light.
The wine store... the ice house... Menna’s waiting tomb.
Merrily stood by the last of the laurels, on the edge of the lawn, and looked up at the Victorian house – substantial, grey and gabled, three storeys high. The light from the open door of the tomb, maybe forty yards away, was bright enough to outline the regular stone blocks in the back wall of the house. She could see the shadows of heavy, lumpen furniture in the room immediately behind a bay window on the ground floor. This house was very J.W. Weal.
At its end of the lawn, the mausoleum was a squat Palladian temple. Victorian kitsch, its interior was creamed with electric light from two wrought-iron hanging lanterns. Then the light was suddenly blocked and diffused... two men looming. Merrily backed up against the house wall, laurel leaves wet on her face.
