The Cure of Souls

He talked from under his hat, stretching out his legs. ‘I think what Simon didn’t mention about this Stewart Ash was his interest – as an author, a chronicler of social history – in our travelling friends. Not the New Age travellers – the old kind.’

‘Gypsies?’

Prof nodded. ‘Romanies. Used to come here in force every autumn for the hop-picking. Enormous work in those days before the machines. Some of them even travelling over from Europe in their vardos, year after year. A colourful spectacle – you’ll find all this in the hop museum, as well. The Romanies were a little community inside a community, and of course Ash very much wanted to record their memories, for his book – what they thought of the hop-masters, how well they were treated. A man with a social conscience. Well, there’s a few Romany families, not many, still coming back, to help the machinery do the work – though whether they’ll be back this year, after what happened, is anyone’s guess. Anyway, off goes our Mr Ash to talk to them. Only gypsies, by tradition, don’t like to talk. It’s their history, why should the gaujos profit from it?’

Prof tilted up his hat, looking for Lol’s reaction.

‘That’s a point,’ Lol said cautiously.

‘I have sympathy for the Romanies,’ Prof said. ‘A persecuted race, big victims of the Holocaust.’

Prof rarely talked about this; he liked to call himself a ‘lapsed Jew’, but Lol knew from other sources that his family had been considerably depleted by Hitler. Aunts and uncles, certainly, if not his parents. It would explain why Prof, who was accustomed to ignoring his immediate neighbourhood, had taken a certain interest in this story.

‘But Ash, you see, was by all accounts a generous man, and he didn’t expect the stuff for nothing. He established what you might call a rapport with a few of the gypsies. What he might have called a rapport, though they would probably have had a different name for it.’

‘Like, they got more out of him than he got out of them?’

‘They haven’t survived, the Romanies, by passing up on opportunities, though it was probably a little more complicated than ripping off the guy for a bunch of made-up stories. Complicated, for one thing, by Ash being representative of another significant minority.’

‘Oh?’

‘Did he form too close a rapport with certain of his travelling friends? Did they take his money for services rendered? None of this ever came out in court when the case was heard earlier this year. It amounted to two little bleeders breaking in one night. Gypsy boys, brothers. Old man comes down in the night, catches them messing with his cameras and stuff – this was how it was put in the papers. They beat the poor bugger to death.’

‘Christ,’ said Lol.

‘Last year, this would be, late summer. There you go: ain’t what it was, the countryside.’ Prof laughed hoarsely. ‘Bear this in mind, Laurence. Make sure you always lock up at night, when I’ve gone.’

4 The Reservoir

ST MARY THE Virgin guarded Dilwyn like a mother hen: a good, solid medieval parish church with a squat steeple on the tower. But it was always going to be the village below that got the attention: bijou black and white cottages around the green – a movie set, birthday card, timber-framed heaven.

In fact, you only really noticed the church on the way out of the village. And if she hadn’t been leaving the village, Merrily might also have missed seeing the woman, coming down from the porch past ancient gravestones – just a few of them, selectively spaced as if the less-sightly stones had been removed.

She seemed as timeless as the cottages themselves: a big woman, comfortably overweight, walking with her head high, a shopping basket over her arm. You expected there to be big, rosy apples in it, maybe some fresh, brown eggs.

It could be her, couldn’t it? Merrily slowed the car and then reversed, turning on the forecourt of the Crown Inn, and parking next to the village green.

The Shelbones’ bungalow had been easy enough to find, sunk into a lane leading out of the village in the general direction of Stretford whose church of St Cosmas and St Damien – once desecrated with a pool of urine and a gutted crow – had been the scene of Merrily’s first, humiliating exorcism-of-place. The bungalow had lace curtains and flower beds with bright clusters of bedding plants. It was traditional – no barbecue, no water-feature. And no one had answered the door.

But this woman looked promising. She was about the right age – mid-fifties. With her dark green linen skirt and her grey-brown hair loosely permed, you had the impression she didn’t care overmuch if she did resemble her mother at that same age.

Merrily switched off the engine, wound down the window and waited for the woman to reach the green. Late afternoon had brought on the first overcast sky of the week, dense with white heat. Droplets of birdsong were sprinkled over the distant buzz of invisible traffic on the main road above the village.

The woman had stopped to check something in her basket. Wearily, Merrily levered herself out of the car, leaned against the door. She was wearing a blue cotton jacket, a white silk scarf over her dog collar in case the Shelbones didn’t want the neigh-bours knowing they were having visits from strange clergy. She hadn’t bought any new summer clothes last year, and there’d be no need for any this year either. She wasn’t planning to go anywhere. This would be the first summer she’d stayed behind while Jane went off on holiday – joining another family in a big farmhouse in Pembrokeshire where there was sea and surfing.

Not that the kid seemed especially excited. She just slumped around, sluggish and grumpy. Maybe it was the weight of the exams and the weather. Or some unknown burden? Something they needed to discuss? Perhaps there’d be a violent thunderstorm tonight, with the electricity cut off, as it usually was: a time for candlelight confidences to be swapped across the kitchen table, maybe their last chance for a meaningful discussion before Jane went away for a month, leaving Merrily alone in the seven-bedroom vicarage.

The woman was now crossing the road towards the green. Merrily stepped away from the car.

‘Mrs Shelbone?’

‘Good afternoon.’ She looked neither surprised nor curious – in a village this size a stranger would swiftly have rounded up a dozen people who could have pointed her out.

‘I had a call from Canon Beckett, this morning,’ Merrily said. ‘I’m Merrily Watkins. I rang—’

‘I know. It wasn’t convenient to talk to you then. I’m sorry.’ Mrs Shelbone spoke briskly, local accent. ‘I was intending to call you back tonight when we could speak freely.’

Dennis must have told her to expect a call from the Deliverance Consultant, but the girl, Amy, had been in the house, Merrily guessed, at the time she rang. She suddenly felt wrong-footed, because this woman already knew exactly who she was and what she was doing here, and now she was getting that familiar, dismayed look that said: You’re the wrong sex, you’re too young, you’re too small.

She slipped a hand defensively to her scarf. Mrs Hazel Shelbone shifted her shopping basket from one hand to the other. In the basket were two tins of polish and some yellow dusters, neatly folded. No apples, no eggs.

‘Well, my dear,’ Mrs Shelbone said, ‘this isn’t really a good place to leave your car. I should take it a little way down that lane over there. Perhaps we could meet in the church in about five minutes?’ She produced a smile that was wry and resigned. ‘The scene of the crime, as it were.’

In the long church porch with its glassless, iron-barred Gothic windows, Merrily took a few long breaths, whispered a rather feverish prayer.

Jane had once asked, insouciantly, So when do they issue you with the black medical bag and the rubber apron for the green bile?

The truth was that Merrily had never exorcized a person. Deliverance Consultant might be an unsatisfactory title, but it was a more accurate job description than Diocesan Exorcist. Heavy spiritual cleansing had never been more than an infrequent last resort.

Tell me if it’s real, Merrily mumbled to God. Don’t let me get this