Midwinter of the Spirit

‘What d’you think?’

‘Could be a few things. Could be just a very nasty little man. Or it could be a carrier.’

‘A carrier. Did you tell us about carriers?’

‘Happen I forgot.’

‘Meaning you deliberately forgot. Would carriers be the people who pick up hitchhikers?’

‘You’re not daft, Merrily. I said that, din’t I? Provable carriers are… not that common. And not easy to diagnose. And they can lead to a lot of hysteria of the fundamentalist type. You know, if one bloke’s got it, it must be contagious? And then you get these dubious mass-exorcisms, everybody rolling around and clutching their guts.’

‘Just one man,’ Merrily said, ‘so far.’

‘That’s good to know. Well, a carrier is usually a nasty person who attracts more nastiness to him – like iron filings to a magnet. Usually there’s a bit of a sexual kink. An overly powerful sex-drive and probably not bright. Not a lot up top, too much down below.’

‘Anything I need to do now he’s gone?’

‘To make sure he don’t come back? Sounds like Mr Dobbs has done it. Not going quietly into that good night, is he?’

‘Clearly not.’

‘Might not work, mind. That’s the big irony with Deliverance – half the time it don’t work. But in somewhere like a hospital it’ll fade or get consumed by all the rest of the pervading anguish. You could happen do a protection on yourself periodically. Oh, and leave off sex for a week.’

‘Gosh, Huw, that’s going to be a tall order.’

‘Oh dear,’ Huw said. ‘So you’re still on your own, eh? What a bloody waste. God hates waste.’

Before lunch, Merrily made an appointment to meet Mrs Susan Thorpe at the Glades Residential Home at eleven o’clock the following morning. There must have been somebody in the room who didn’t know about this issue, because Mrs Thorpe kept addressing her as if she were Rentokil coming to deal with an infestation of woodworm.

Sophie was meeting a friend for lunch at the Green Dragon. Merrily decided to see what was on offer at the cafe inside All Saints Church: a fairly ingenious idea for getting bums on pews or at least close to pews.

But first – Sod it, I’m not walking away from this – she slipped round the wall and back into Gwynne Street.

There was a weak, cream-coloured sun now over Broad Street, but Gwynne Street was still in shadow. The only point of light was in the middle of Dobbs’s flaking green door.

It turned out to be a slender white envelope trapped by a corner in the letterbox flap. As she raised a fist to knock on the door and wondered if she ought to push the envelope through, she saw the name typed on the front:

Mrs M Watkins

She caught a movement at an upstairs window and glanced up, saw a curtain quiver. He was there! The old bastard had been in the whole time. He’d watched her standing here knocking more paint from his door.

And now he’d left her a letter.

The street was deserted: no cars, no people, no voices. She felt like smashing Dobbs’s window. Instead she snatched the envelope out of the box and walked away and didn’t look back.

She walked quickly out of Gwynne Street, past the Christian bookshop and the Tourist Information Shop, and round the corner into King Street, where she stood at the kerb and tore open the envelope. She hoped it was a threat, something abusive.

There was a single sheet of notepaper folded inside. In the centre, a single line of type:

The first exorcist was Jesus Christ.

This was all it said.

15 Male Thing

THE WOMAN BEHIND the counter was, by any standards, dropdead gorgeous. Worse still, kind of pale and mysterious and distant, with hair you could trip over.

A woollen scarf masking her lower face, Jane watched from outside the shop window. Saturday morning: bright enough to bring thousands of shoppers into Hereford from all over the county and from large areas of Wales; cold enough for there still to be condensation on the windows, even in sheltered Church Street.

Jane had come in on the early bus, the only bus out of Ledwardine on a Saturday. At half-twelve, Rowenna was picking her up outside the Library. It was Psychic Fair day.

Which left her a couple of hours to kill. It was inevitable she’d wind up here at some point.

She almost wished she hadn’t; this was so awful. Lol had written songs about creatures like this. And now he lived above the same shop. Maybe during the lunch hour the woman would weave her languorous way up some archaic spiral staircase, and he’d be waiting for her up on the landing, where they’d start undressing each other before making their frenzied…

‘Jane?’

Damn. He must have come out of a side entrance. She must remain cool, show no surprise.

‘So that’s her, is it, Lol?’

‘Who?’

He was shivering in his thin, faded sweatshirt. His hair needed attention; it had never looked the same since he’d cut it off at the back and lost the ponytail. Made him look too grownup, almost like a man of thirty-eight.

‘Moon?’ Jane lowered her scarf. Inside the shop, the woman saw them looking at her and smiled absently, arranging a display of CDs on the counter. ‘She’s quite ordinary-looking, isn’t she?’

‘Almost plain,’ Lol said. ‘Jane, how much would it cost to make you go away and stop embarrassing me?’

‘More than you’ve got on you. Much more.’

‘How about a cappuccino?’

‘Yeah, that’ll do,’ Jane said.

It was set in deep countryside, a kind of manor house, rambling but not very old, maybe early nineteenth- century. Squat gateposts with plain stone balls on top, and a notice in the entrance – THE GLADES RESIDENTIAL HOME – stencilled over a painted purple hill with the sun above it. A bright yellow sun with no suggestion of it setting, which would have been the wrong image altogether.

There was a small car park in front, with a sweeping view of the Radnor hills, but a woman appeared around the side of the house and beckoned her to drive closer to her.

Merrily followed the drive around to a brick double-garage and parked in front of it, the woman hurrying after her.

‘You’re wearing your… uniform,’ she said in a loud, dismayed whisper, when Merrily got out of the car. ‘I’m sorry, I should have emphasized the need for discretion.’

Merrily smiled. ‘Don’t worry about that.’ Don’t worry yet; we may not even paste your case on the Deliverance website.

‘It’s all been very difficult,’ the woman said. ‘We didn’t want to call in the local vicar – far too close – so the obvious person was Mr Dobbs, but then… such a bombshell – we won’t talk about that. I’m Susan Thorpe. We’ll go in this way.’

She was a big woman, dark blonde hair pushed under a wide, practical hairslide. She led Merrily through a small back door, down a short drab passage and into what was clearly her private sitting room: very untidy.

‘Have a seat. Throw those magazines on the floor. I’ve sent for some coffee, is that all right? God, I didn’t