Midwinter of the Spirit

God! He kept looking at her face.

‘I wanted to tell him – my father – that it was OK, it was me, I was back. I was here. I wanted to tell him it was all right, that I’d help him to find peace.’

‘You tried to talk to him?’

‘No, not last night. I couldn’t get close enough to him. This was the first night… last Saturday. Yeah, I had a sleep and then I went for a walk in the woods, where he shot himself. I went there when it was dark.’

‘You saw him then?’ This is eerie. This is not good.

‘I didn’t see him then. That was when I started to call out for him.’

‘Literally?’

‘Maybe. I remember standing in the woods and screaming, “Daddy!” It was funny… It was like I was a small child again.’

Lol said tentatively, ‘You, um… you think that was safe, on your own?’

‘Oh, nothing will ever happen to me on the hill. I intend to walk and walk, day and night, until I know every tree and bush of those woods, every fold of every field. I’ve got to make up for all those years away, you know? I have to absolutely immerse myself in the hill – until it goes everywhere with me. Until it fills my dreams.’

‘So when you… when you saw him, that was a kind of dream, was it?’

She looked down at him. Her nightdress smelled of sweat and mothballs. Her hair hung down over each shoulder, like a stole.

She said, ‘Are you supposed to be my therapist now, Lol?’

‘I don’t think so, not officially. I just help Dick.’

‘Dick’s hopeless, isn’t he? Dick’s a dead loss. He doesn’t believe in anything outside of textbook psychology.’

‘He’s a nice bloke,’ Lol said awkwardly. ‘He wants to do his best for you.’

‘He’s an idiot. If you told Dick I’d seen my father, he’d come up with a beautiful theory involving hallucinations or drugs. But you see I don’t have any drugs. I don’t need anything up here; it’s a constant, natural high. And it would be kind of an insult anyway. And I have never had hallucinations, ever.’

Her hair swung close to his face. It was the kind of hair medieval maidens dangled from high windows so that knights could climb up and rescue them.

‘So it’s not official,’ she said. ‘I mean us: we’re not counsellor and patient or anything.’

Lol was confused. He felt himself blushing.

‘We’re a bit official,’ he said.

‘You have to report back to Dick?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘You’ll tell him about this?’

‘Not if…’

Moon turned away and dipped like a heron between two boxes, coming up with a dark green cardigan which she pulled on.

‘Then it was a dream.’ She bent and pouted at him, a petulant child. ‘It was all a dream.’

7 Graveyard Angel

A MYSTERIOUS SUMMONS to the Bishop’s Palace.

Wednesday afternoon: market day, and the city still crowded. Merrily found a parking space near The Black Lion in Bridge Street. She might have been allowed to drive into the Palace courtyard, but this could be considered presumptuous; she didn’t want that – almost didn’t want to be noticed sliding through the shoppers in her black woollen two-piece, a grey silk scarf over her dog-collar.

Looking out, while she was in the area, for Canon Dobbs, the exorcist.

What she needed was a confidential chat with the old guy, nobody else involved. To clear the air, maybe even iron things out. If she took on this task, she wanted no hard feelings, no trail of resentment.

Contacting Dobbs was not so easy. In Deliverance, according to Huw Owen, low-profile was essential, to avoid being troubled by cranks and nutters or worse. But his guy was well below the parapet – not even, as she discovered, in the phone book. As a residential canon at the Cathedral he had no parishioners to be accessible to, but ex-directory?

Evensong at Ledwardine Church had recently been suspended by popular demand, or rather the absence of it, so on Sunday night – with Jane out at a friend’s – Merrily had found time to ring Alan Crombie, the Rector of Madley. But he wasn’t much help.

‘Never had to consult him, Merrily – but I remember Colin Strong. When he was at Vowchurch, there was a persistent problem at a farmhouse and he ended up getting Dobbs in. I think he simply did it through the Bishop’s office. You leave a message and he gets in touch with you.’

Well, that was no use. It would get right back to Mick Hunter.

‘So ordinary members of the public have no real access to Dobbs?’

‘Not initially,’ Alan Crombie said. ‘It’s strictly clergy-consultation. That’s normal practice. If you have a problem you go to your local priest and he decides if he can cope with it or if he needs specialist advice.’

‘What happened at Vowchurch? Did Dobbs deal with it?’

‘Lord knows. One of his rules is total secrecy. Anything gets in the papers, I gather his wrath is awesome to behold. Do you have another little problem in that department yourself, Merrily?’

‘No, I…’ Oh, what the hell! ‘Off the record, Alan, the Bishop’s asked me to succeed Dobbs when he… retires.’

‘Oh, I see.’ Silence, then a nervous laugh. ‘Well… rather you than me.’

‘I realize I may have to buy a black bag and a big hat.’

‘God, you don’t want to go in for that kind of thing,’ Alan had said with another nervous laugh. ‘Have all kinds of perverts following you home.’

Merrily walked along King Street, the Cathedral up ahead filling her vision. She had no idea what Dobbs looked like and saw no men in big hats with black bags.

Although it didn’t look much from the front, the Bishop’s Palace was perhaps the most desirable dwelling in Hereford: next door to the Cathedral but closer to the River Wye, and dreamily visible from the public footpath on the opposite bank, with its big white windows on mellow red brick, tree-fringed lawns sloping to the water.

Inside, she’d never been further than the vastly refurbished twelfth-century Great Hall where receptions were held. Today she didn’t even make it across the courtyard. Sophie Hill, the Bishop’s elegant white-haired lay- secretary, met her at the entrance, steering her through a door under the gatehouse and up winding stone stairs, about twenty of them.

‘It’s not very big, but Michael thought you’d like it better that way.’

‘I’m sorry?’ Merrily pulled off her scarf.

‘It could be quite charming’ – Sophie reached beyond her to push open the door at the top of the steps – ‘with a few pictures and things. To the left, please, Mrs Watkins.’

There were two offices in the gatehouse: a bigger one with a vista of Broad Street… and this.

Sloping ceiling, timbered and whitewashed walls, a desk with a phone. A scuffed repro captain’s chair that swivelled, two filing cabinets, a small bookcase with a Bible and some local reference books, including Jane’s one- time bible, The Folklore of Herefordshire by Ella Mary Leather.

Merrily walked uncertainly over to the window overlooking the courtyard and the former stables, a few parked cars and great stacks of split logs for the Bishop’s fires.

‘Welcome to Deliverance Tower,’ said Sophie deadpan. ‘The computer’s on order.’

Walking dazed into the blustery sunshine on Broad Street, Merrily felt the hand of fate so heavily on her shoulder that she nearly threw up an arm to shake it off.

It had felt good up in the gatehouse, almost cosy. On top of the city and yet remote from it – a refuge, an