Midwinter of the Spirit

she’d have to talk to him – at length, no doubt. Before then, she wanted to have lost this… virus.

In the afternoon, she filled a plastic bottle with tapwater and took it across to the church and into the chancel, where she stood it before the altar. In the choir stalls, she meditated for almost an hour. Blue and gold. Lamplit path.

She went into the vestry and changed into the cassock and surplice she’d worn at St Cosmas and St Damien, since washed and replaced in the vestry wardrobe. She walked, head bowed, along the central aisle, back to the chancel, and stood before the altar.

‘Lord God Almighty, the Creator of Life, bless this water…’

Back in the vicarage, she went up to her bedroom and sprinkled holy water in all four corners. Then across the threshold and at the window, top and bottom.

She went down on her knees and prayed that the soul of our brother Denzil might be directed away from its suffering and its earthly obsessions and led into the Light.

Filtered through fog, the fading light lay like a dustsheet on the bedroom.

Jane felt uncomfortable on the school bus home. Increasingly so, as more and more students got off. The buses had arrived early at the school, on account of the fog which was getting worse; classes had been wound up twenty minutes ahead of time.

The bus was moving very slowly, in low gear. It must be like driving through frogspawn. Jane just hoped to God that Mum was feeling better – was not going to be really ill.

Ledwardine was near the end of the line. Dean Wall, legendary greaseball, knew that, so there was no need at all for him to dump his fat ass on the seat next to Jane. He was on his own tonight, his mate Danny Gittoes off sick, supposedly.

‘Just wanted to make sure you didn’t miss your stop in all this fog. Seein’ as how you en’t much used to buses these days.’

Very funny! Jane gathered her bag protectively on to her lap. ‘Don’t worry about me. I have a natural homing instinct.’

The bus was crawling now. She had no idea where the hell they were.

‘Only tryin’ t’be helpful, Watkins.’ Dean Wall shoved his fat thigh against hers, leaned back and stretched. The fat bastard clearly wasn’t going to move. ‘Goin’ out tonight?’

‘Probably not.’

‘Off with some bloke tonight, then, is she?’

‘I wouldn’t have thought so.’

Wall’s big fat lips shambled into a loose smile.

‘Look, just sod off, OK?’ Jane said.

‘I wouldn’t worry, Watkins – you’ll still get yours. Er’s likely bisexual.’

‘Will you piss off?’

‘You don’t know nothin’, do you? You’re dead naive, you are.’

Jane gazed out of the window at dense nothing. ‘Stop trying to wind me up.’

‘I’m tryin’ to put you right, Jane. You wanner talk to Gittoes, you do. ’Cept he en’t capable of speech right now – still recoverin’, like. His ma’s thinkin’ of gettin’ him plastic surgery to take the smile off his face.’

‘I don’t want to know!’

‘I bet you do.’ Dean Wall leaned a little closer and Jane shrank against the streaming window. Dean lowered his voice. ‘’Er give Danny a blow job, back o’ the woodwork building.’

She spun and stared at him.

‘Listen, I en’t kiddin’, Jane.’ He threw up his hands like she was about to hit him. ‘Gittoes was pretty bloody gobsmacked himself, as it were.’

‘You totally disgusting slimeball.’

‘’Er needed a favour, see.’

‘I want you to sit somewhere else, all right?’ Jane said. ‘I’m going to count to five. If you haven’t gone by then, I’ll start screaming. Then I’ll tell the driver you put your hand up my skirt.’

‘Mrs Straker?’

‘Yes?’

‘Who’s this?’

‘It’s Merrily Watkins again. I’ve tried several times to call back, but I suppose you had to go out.’

‘Who’d you say you were?’

‘Merrily – it’s Jane’s mum. She’s Rowenna’s friend. We spoke earlier.’

‘I think you’ve got the wrong number, dear.’

‘We spoke about an hour and a half ago. You said there was something I should know about Rowenna.’

You won’t find it funny. I’ll guarantee that.

‘You must be thinking of somebody else,’ Mrs Straker said. ‘I’ve never spoken to you before in my life.’

She couldn’t talk, Merrily decided. Someone had come into the house who shouldn’t hear this. Or someone she was afraid of.

‘Is there somebody with you? Has Rowenna come back? Is Jane with her? Could you just answer yes or no?’

‘Listen,’ Mrs Straker hissed, ‘I don’t know who you are, but if you pester me again I’ll call the police. That clear enough for you, dear? Now get off the fucking line.’

She lay awake that night for over an hour, a whole carillon of alarm bells ringing.

It was the first evening this week that she and Jane had eaten together. Afterwards, they made a log fire in the drawing room and watched TV, all very mellow and companionable. Later they put out the lamps and moved out of the draughts and close to the fire, sipped their tea and talked. And then she got around to telling Jane about Katherine Moon.

‘Dead?’

So she hadn’t known. It was hard to tell how Jane really felt about this; she seemed to have assumed Moon and Lol had been, at some stage, an item. When Merrily came to Moon’s use of the Iron Age knife – this kind of stuff never seemed to upset Jane particularly, as long as no animals were involved – the kid nodded solemnly.

‘Sure. The later Celtic period, coming up to the Dark Ages, that was like this really screwed-up time.’

‘It was?’ Merrily curling her legs on to the sofa.

‘Bad magic. The Druids were getting into blood sacrifices and stuff. If your family was rooted in all that, you’re quite likely to get reverberations. Plus, who knows what else happened on the site of that barn? I mean way back. It could be really poisoned, giving off all kinds of mind-warping vibrations. If you don’t know how to handle these things, it could go badly wrong for you.’

‘That’s very interesting,’ Merrily had said mildly. ‘Where did you learn all that, flower?’

‘Everybody knows that,’ Jane said inscrutably. She was sitting on a big cushion at the edge of the hearth. ‘So this Moon was bonkers all along?’

‘She had a history of psychiatric problems.’

Which led to a long and fairly sensible discussion about Lol and the kind of unsuitable women into whose ambience he seemed to have been drawn, beginning with his born-again Christian mother, then the problem over a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, when he himself was about nineteen but no more mature than the girl, and then some older woman who was into drugs, and later Alison Kinnersley who’d first drawn him to Herefordshire for entirely her own ends.

‘How’s he taken it?’ Jane set her mug down on the hearth and prodded at a log with the poker.

‘He thinks he should have known the way things were going, which is what people always say after a suicide. But in this case people were trying to help her. It’s very odd. It doesn’t add up.’

‘So, like, Lol… was he in love with her?’

‘I really don’t think so, flower.’

And at this point the phone had rung and she’d waited and dialled 1471, finding it had been Lol himself. She called him back from the scullery-office, still answering monosyllabically, because Jane was sometimes a stealthy