‘Making it even sexier telly, right?’
Headlamps speared through the porch and then veered away — a vehicle stopping directly outside the doors. The two policemen moved to either side of the entrance. Mumford and a stocky policewoman in a dark blue jersey waited by the reception desk.
Presently, five people came in through the porch: two uniforms, two detectives, one woman.
‘We appreciate you can’t just exorcise a place willy-nilly. You’d need a focus,’ Matthew said.
For just a moment, from about ten feet away, the gaze of the killer, Brigid Parsons, met Merrily’s. The eyes were brown and candid. What had she expected — cold, bleak, washed clean of humanity? Brigid was wearing a fleece-lined light-blue waterproof jacket hanging open over a dark shirt and jeans. Her head was held high, the dense dark brown hair falling back. As if she was finally ready to shed the years of dyes and deception.
Matthew said, ‘We were thinking that the late Hattie Chancery might fit the agenda.’
43
Tough Ole Bat
Merrily found Gomer in his truck, parked on the edge of the forecourt where the snow was churned up like cold custard. She’d climbed in next to him just as he finished talking to Danny on his old car-phone.
‘How’s Jeremy taking it?’
Gomer got out his ciggy tin, squinted at it, then put it back in a pocket of his scarred old bomber jacket.
‘When things is bad, Jeremy just closes down, like he’s been unplugged.’
‘Where are they now, Gomer?’
‘Back at The Nant.’
Through the windscreen, Merrily watched a policeman come out of the porch and look up at the flaking sky. The snow had become sporadic again, as if the weather was playing with them. One of the witch’s-hat towers was wreathed in a pinkish vapour.
‘And Clancy?’
‘Still at Greta’s, with a woman cop. Cliff Morgan, he reckoned they’d likely bring her yere tomorrow, give ’em some time together, ’fore her mam’s taken to Hereford. Don’t look like that’s gonner happen till it gets light and they clears the roads. Any chance her’ll walk away from this, vicar? Light sentence? If her had good reason? Not a nice feller, Sebbie.’
Merrily shivered inside Jane’s worn duffel coat, tightened her scarf. Clearly Gomer didn’t yet know that this was Brigid Parsons and the chances of her getting out of prison
‘Cops know her’s Hattie’s granddaughter, vicar?’
‘I think they’d regard that as a closed case.’
The curtains in the hotel lounge had been drawn now, for the interrogation of the prime suspect. A shadow rose against them: Bliss throwing up his arms in probable frustration, but it looked like he was dancing.
‘Nothin’ happens round yere’s ever closed. You knows that,’ Gomer said.
The church’s main door was locked, and there was nothing in the stone porch apart from the side benches, the parish notice-board and a rack of leaflets.
‘Satisfied?’ Dexter said.
Lol couldn’t see Dexter, but the density of him made the stone porch feel claustrophobic. He bounced the torch beam around one last time.
‘You’re a funny bugger, Lol. What’s she to you?’
‘Alice?’
‘Less it gets you brownie points with the vicar. Gets you into her, whatsit, cassock.’
‘That must be it, then,’ Lol said tightly.
He wanted to smash the torch into Dexter’s face. Instead, he switched it off so that Dexter couldn’t see him thinking. When Dexter had appeared at the scullery window, he’d come across the lawn from the orchard, and then gone back the same way, which would have brought him into the churchyard. Dexter had been this way before.
Lol looked out, down the churchyard path and found that he couldn’t see the lychgate. Normally it would be outlined in gold, from the lantern on the perimeter wall.
The lantern had gone out. Lol bent and peered through where the gate would be. Usually, you would see the lamps on the square and the partly floodlit profile of the Black Swan.
‘Power’s gone.’
‘Big surprise,’ Dexter said.
He was right; it was bound to happen. Sometimes it only lasted a couple of minutes, but more often three or four hours. And occasionally, in weather like this, two or three days.
Lol switched on the torch. ‘Just hope the phone line’s still up. You want to check that footpath, through the orchard, or call the police now?’
‘En’t your problem. You might as well go home. I’ll call ’em from the bungalow, look.’
‘OK.’ Lol would call them, as soon as he got back to the vicarage. ‘Well… I hope she’s all right.’
‘Tough ole bat,’ Dexter said. ‘Hey—’
‘Sorry?’
‘Give the vicar one for me.’ Dexter sniggered.
‘’Night, Dexter.’ Lol walked back into the churchyard. The snow had slowed again, or maybe the loss of light just made it seem that way.
‘Hold on — wrong way, boy.’
‘I’ll go through the orchard, into the vicarage garden.’
‘Don’t wanner do that this time o’ night. Bloody dangerous, look, all this—’
‘Done it
And now he did. He moved as quickly as he could through the untrodden snow, listening for the sound of Dexter crunching after him, like before, but it didn’t come.
He adjusted the head of the torch to issue a wide beam, and the graves appeared out of the snow, like the stumps of a shorn forest, all the unsightly bits — the borders and the gravel beds, the pots of long-dead flowers — submerged.
The path, too, had vanished, and he had to guess his way through the wider gaps between graves and tombs overhung by the snow-bent branches of elderly apple trees.
He stopped when he heard the breathing.
Coming from somewhere in front of him, and it was very loud, theatrically loud and eerie — vampire breathing. Something alive among the graves.
Dexter. Dexter had done a circuit of the church and was waiting for him and letting him know. He’d lied to Dexter — been this way no more than once or twice, in high summer. He turned, and his foot stabbed into a squat gravestone, mostly buried. He pulled back in pain, shining the torch directly ahead of him, the beam hitting a wall of white, an impassable snowbank. Swinging the torch to the right he found one of the old toppled tombs, its cracks and cavities compacted with snow.
And what looked like a collapsed, eroded stone angel, breathing.
Antony Largo was in his denims and he looked invigorated and younger than Jane remembered him, and more cheerful. Pacing the kitchen, sizing things up. The stubble on his face was almost a beard now, and made his grin seem bigger and whiter.
‘And how were you received, Matt?’
Matthew Hawksley considered. ‘She was polite, courteous… but I’m not holding my breath.’
‘She won’t go near it,’ Jane said. ‘Even a minor exorcism takes a lot of preparation — days, sometimes. They don’t go into it without long discussions with like