Midwinter of the Spirit

‘She seems to have used a number of identities,’ Merrily said.

‘But, in the end, just one,’ said Huw.

Howe looked at him.

‘The archetypal Scarlet Woman, lass. The temptress.’

Merrily thought, What’s he saying? It was true that everything about Rowenna disturbed her: preying like a succubus on the Salisbury clergy, obviously dominating her own family – why had Mrs Straker suddenly clammed up? – and pulling off that insidiously effective psychic attack with the dregs of Denzil Joy. Rowenna was terribly dangerous – and still out there.

‘She certainly seems to have acquired a considerable amount of money,’ Howe said.

‘For services rendered,’ Huw told her.

‘Certainly the basis for a few questions when we do find her. And I do want to find that girl – and Michael Hunter – before someone at Division decides to take this case out of my hands. Which is why I’m talking to… to people like you. Ms Watkins, when you suggested to Hunter that he knew something about the death of Paul Sayer…?’

‘I’m sorry. I chose that moment to try and get away. Paul Sayer was never mentioned again.’

‘But you raised it with him purely because your secretary told you she recognized Sayer from one of my photographs, yes?’

‘It was the day you came into the Deliverance office. She recognized Sayer as a man who had actually come into the office asking for the Bishop – making Mick angry in a way Sophie says she’d never seen before – in a way that seemed to her… unepiscopal. Sophie’s very discreet and very loyal, but also very observant.’

‘This was not on the night he died, however.’

‘No. A couple of days earlier.’

‘Hold on.’ Howe picked up a phone. ‘Douglas, could somebody bring in Mrs Sophie Hill from the Bishop’s office?… No, now… Thank you.’

‘What you have to understand about Sophie,’ said Merrily, ‘is that the Cathedral is her life. She worried about this thing for days. She kept half-approaching me and then backing off.’

‘Sure,’ Howe said. ‘Damn it, I think I’m going to have some divers in the Wye again.’

Huw slid from her desk. ‘For Hunter?’

‘What do you think?’

‘Unlikely. He moves fast, that lad, in his jogging gear.’

Merrily closed her eyes for a moment, trying to remember which way Hunter had gone after the stone pot had made such a gloriously jagged, noisy hole in ancient glass. He’d stared at her for a moment, then she’d turned and run away – as lights were coming on everywhere, a verger and a policeman thrusting out of the door.

‘And Hunter has friends,’ Huw said. ‘More friends than even he knows. Friends in dark places.’

55 Location Classified

THEY SAT AMONGST the stones and they lit a candle for Tommy Canty.

Huw held the candle over each disfigured knight in turn, making a blessing for each. Merrily wondered if it had been the Bishop himself who had taken away the single knight and then brought it back, making sure that the tomb was still lying in pieces for the time of the Boy Bishop ceremony.

They would probably never know. Huw was convinced Mick Hunter would now be abroad. Italy, he thought; there were a number of dark sanctuaries in Italy. How did he know that?

So many questions.

DS Franny Bliss had been summoned back to St Cosmas and St Damien after reports from the two ornithologist ladies that a couple of people had been seen acting suspiciously close to the church, which the ladies apparently had been virtually staking out ever since. As a result, Craig the crow-catcher was in the cells, now suspected of greater involvement in the desecration than previously thought.

So, once again last night, simultaneous action along the Dinedor Line – with the Cathedral in the middle. Jane had seen Rowenna making a call on her mobile phone – perhaps to the Purefoys – as the Boy Bishop was about to be installed. And then, coincidentally or not, a power failure. Its cause had still not been established.

Lol was convinced that, this time, the Purefoys – always assuming they were controlling the assault, which was by no means certain – believed they were using the very spirit, the element, the essence of Katherine Moon to try to awaken something aggressively pre-Christian. They believed it, so at some level it was happening? And what form had their ritual – over by the time Lol arrived – actually taken? This all needed thinking about. Perhaps Merrily would be compelled to consult (Oh God!) Miss Athena White.

‘But they were right, weren’t they, lass?’ Huw was stroking a stone.

‘Mm?’

‘The demon manifested in clerical clothing?’

‘Yes, I suppose it did.’

And where was it now? Where was the squatter? Did it die with Dobbs? Did it flee with Mick? Was it over?

‘Over?’ Huw laughed a lot. ‘The oldest war in the world, over? I’ll tell you what, though…’ He grew sober. ‘We’re up against it now. The Church is on its knees now, and the more we get weakened by public apathy, the more they’ll put the boot in.’

‘Jane thinks there’s a new spirituality on the rise, replacing organized worship.’

‘With all respect to the lass,’ Huw said, ‘it’s people like Jane who’ll turn religion into a minority sport.’

‘She sees it more in terms of a period of cataclysmic psychic upheaval.’

‘Could be,’ Huw said. ‘But if that happens, they’ll still need somebody to police it. And, all the time, we’re going to have folk like your Inspector Howe dismissing us as loonies. We’re going to have battles with psychologists and social workers. We’re going to be attacked by fellers like that Dick Lyden, who thinks Dobbs was persecuting his poor maladjusted son. And, naturally, we’re always going to be regarded with suspicion within the Church itself.’

Merrily stood up and dusted her knees. ‘Hunter wanted me to draft a paper on New Deliverance. He suggested this would be an approach acceptable to psychologists and social workers.’

‘For New Deliverance, read Soft Deliverance,’ Huw said.

‘I suppose that’s right.’

‘Happen that was going to be one of Mick’s principal contributions: pioneer of Soft Deliverance. On the surface, decently liberal – exorcism by committee – but, underneath, the gradual dismantling of the final human barrier against satanic evil.’

Merrily shook her head, dubious, bewildered.

‘Stick with it, lass,’ Huw said. ‘You’ve come too far now.’

‘I don’t know. The new bishop may not want me.’

‘There’s that,’ Huw said.

‘Anyway, there’s a lot to think about. Lol and I are going to drive up into the Malverns, or somewhere – to do some walking and talking. He’s very confused and spooked, after his showdown with the Purefoys. It’s all going round in his head; he’s realizing how close he came to winding up as dead as they are, and he’s thinking: What is this about?’

‘I gather that lad Denny Moon died this morning.’

‘Yes.’ She didn’t want to talk about what Lol had heard from a porter in the Accident and Emergency unit at the General.

‘Poor bugger. Always some casualties, Merrily, luv. Always.’

The porter said that, a few seconds after Denny was pronounced dead, a woman patient who’d been brought in after falling down some steps had begun to scream, and the nurses had had to open a window to let out a large black bird.

Huw was saying, ‘Incidentally, I don’t know who the Purefoys have left their place to, and I don’t like to