Midwinter of the Spirit

theory, Inspector?’

‘Go ahead.’

‘All right. You’ve got this smart, handsome lad from a dogcollar dynasty, putting it around Oxford like a sailor on shoreleave. And he’s drawn into summat – drawn in, to put it crudely, by his dick. He’s having the time of his life – the best time ever. He doesn’t see the little rat eyes in the dark.’

‘Meaning what, Mr Owen?’

‘There is a network. It might not put out a monthly newsletter, but it does exist. The general aim is anti-Christian. They might be several different groups, but that’s their one rallying point – the destruction of the Christian Church.’

‘I’d have thought,’ Howe said drily, ‘that they could simply sit back and watch the Church take itself apart.’

‘She’s got a point,’ Merrily said, the need for a cigarette starting to tell.

‘Merrily, lass, you’d be very naive if you thought the Church’s problems were entirely self-generated.’

‘Sorry, go on.’

“They’ve got a good intelligence network, the rat-eyes. The Internet now, more primitive then but, just like Moscow was head-hunting at Oxford and Cambridge in the sixties, the rateyes had their antennae out.’

Lol said, ‘Anna Purefoy was in Oxfordshire then. She worked for the county council. She’d been fired from the MOD after some fundamentalist junior minister found out she was involved in magic, along with a few other people – a purge.’

‘Part of the honey-trap then,’ Huw said. ‘Beautiful, experienced older woman. Aye, I think we can rule out rape in them pictures. Happen she said she enjoyed being tied up. If that is Hunter, it’s an interesting connection, but I’d be looking for something harder. Suppose they stitched our lad up good? Suppose they had him full of drugs, and suppose he really did rape somebody – a young girl, say. Suppose they even arranged for him to kill somebody.’

Annie Howe began to look uneasy. ‘That stuff’s surely apocryphal.’

‘That stuff happens all the time,’ Huw told her. ‘You coppers hate to think there’s ever a murder you don’t know about, but there’s thousands of folk still missing. All right, say they’ve stitched him up – tight enough to have him looking at public disgrace and a long prison sentence.’

Howe sighed. ‘Go on, then.’

‘What do they want of him? I think they want him in the Church.’

‘Oh, wow,’ Merrily murmured.

‘Make your father a happy man, they’d say. Repent of your evil ways. Make restitution. Join the family business. Either that or go down, all the way to the gutter. Well, he’s in a panic, is our lad: self-disgust and a hangover on a grand scale. In need of redemption. So he goes home to his loving family, and the result, after the nightmares and the cold sweats, is the Reverend Michael Henry Hunter, a reformed character.’

‘It’s a brilliant theory, Huw. Is there a precedent?’

‘Happen.’

‘Meaning one you never proved.’

Huw looked down at his trainers. ‘I once exorcised a young curate from Halifax who admitted celebrating a black mass. It was to get them off his back, he said. Blackmail again. I never met anybody more full of remorse.’

‘You think Mick—?’

‘It’s sometimes what they do. They get in touch after he’s ordained, with “Do us this one thing and we’ll leave you alone for ever.” Ha! You likely don’t know this, Inspector, but having a reverse- eucharist performed by an ordained cleric is a very powerfully dark thing. And a fully turned cleric is… lord of all.’

‘Like Tim Purefoy,’ Lol said.

‘There’s one as is better dead, God forgive me.’

‘Hold on,’ Howe said. ‘Are you saying these – whoever they are… possibly the Purefoys – might have been in touch with Hunter throughout his whole career?’

‘Very likely smoothing his path for him. A satanic bishop? Some prize, eh?’

‘Except he wasn’t really,’ Merrily said. ‘He was a man with no committed religious beliefs at all. Perhaps that’s how he could live with it. “I don’t believe in the Devil” – he said that to me. Perhaps he really believed he was using them.’

‘Very likely, lass.’ Huw opened out his hands. ‘Very likely. But it doesn’t change a thing.’

‘But what a career, Huw! What an incredibly lucky career. He never put a foot wrong, said all the right things to all the right people, charmed everyone he met with his energy and his sincerity. He actually told me he believed he was protected.’

‘Obstacles would be moved out of his path. Look at how he got this job – his one rival has a convenient heart attack. Oh, aye, he could very well come to believe he was protected. But not by God, not by the Devil – by his own dynamism, his willpower, his bloody destiny. But what’s the truth of it, Merrily? The truth is he’s a demonic force, whether he believes in it or not.’

‘He believed he was invulnerable, obviously.’ Annie Howe switched off the TV and went to sit down behind her desk, behind a legal notepad. ‘Certainly, if he seemed to think he could murder Ms Watkins in the actual Cathedral precincts, and we’d simply arrest James Lyden for it…’

‘Do you think you would have, lass?’

‘I hate to think so, but… well, we might have. As Lyden had already, that same evening, attacked Jane Watkins and left her unconscious in the crypt with her coat on fire. We’re trying to persuade the CPS to go for attempted murder on that, by the way, but I don’t suppose they will. Tell me your feelings on Sayer, Mr Owen.’

‘Headbanger.’

‘Meaning an amateur, a hanger-on.’

‘If he possessed this tape, he might have been more than that – or not. Did he have a computer? Was he on the Internet?’

‘He was, come to think of it.’

‘You can dredge all kinds of dirt off the Net. If we assume he did know it was Mick Hunter on that tape, he might’ve tried a bit of blackmail. And Hunter sees the tape… or happen he’s seen it before. He knows it looks bugger-all like him now, so he’s not worried about the tape, but he doesn’t like the idea of this lad Sayer walking round spreading bad rumours. Aye, he might well’ve bopped him over the head and dragged him down to the Wye. Cool as you like, popped him in a boat – I bet he had a boat, didn’t he, athletic bugger like him wi’ a river at the bottom of the garden. Then rowed him downstream. Who in a million years would ever look towards the Bishop’s Palace…?’

‘I don’t think Hunter was even supposed to be here that night,’ Merrily said. ‘Out of town, as I recall.’

Huw snorted.

There was a long silence. Merrily looked at Lol, remembering she hadn’t been all that convinced when he’d first told her about Katherine Moon. And yet Lol himself had actually underestimated the full extent of it. They both needed a long walk – somewhere you could feel you weren’t looking through a dirty spiderweb.

‘There isn’t a shred of evidence for any of this, Mr Owen, is there?’ said Annie Howe.

‘We’re none of us coppers, lass. Just poor clergy and a lad wi’ a guitar.’

‘As for the other stuff: the ley-lines, the sacrifice of crows, the alleged presence in the Cathedral…’ Howe pushed her notepad away. ‘I don’t want to know about any of it. I don’t know how you people can pretend to… to do your job at all. To me, it’s a complete fantasy world.’

Lol said, ‘Have you talked to James Lyden?’

‘I have tried to talk to James Lyden. He blames the girl – Rowenna Napier. We found her car, by the way – at the car park at the Severn Bridge motorway services. We’ve circulated a description. Her family seems to have given up on her. Lyden still thinks she’s called Melissa, and that she lived with her now late foster-parents, with whom he’d spent many an interesting hour at their farmhouse on Dinedor Hill.’