‘Tell me,’ said Morrell, ‘have you asked your daughter about this?’
‘She’s… away on holiday.’
‘You see, I’m afraid I really can’t help you. I don’t know anything about any ouija-board sessions. They could very well be happening outside school hours, outside the campus. If you want to give me this girl’s name, we can probably arrange some counselling for her next term.’
‘Or,’ said Charlie Howe, ‘why don’t you ask Merrily to come and give a talk to the sixth-formers? We still have religious education, don’t we?’
‘Social and cultural studies. I’d have to discuss it with my team.’
Merrily pushed back her chair. ‘Well… thanks for listening to me. Although I suspect I’ve wasted your time.’
‘Absolutely not.’ Charlie Howe placed a hand over hers. ‘Emphatically not. Anything that’s affecting the lives of our young people, we want to know about it.’
‘Of course,’ Morrell said.
The car park had a view of playing fields and the distant Black Mountains. Moorfield High, serving scattered villages in north and central Herefordshire, was half a mile from the nearest one and not a church steeple in sight – which wouldn’t displease Morrell, Merrily thought.
Watching the head driving away, the chairman shook his head.
‘It’s his one blind spot, Merrily. He’s a good headmaster in most respects. Knows about discipline. Doesn’t let the little beggars run wild. But he’s an unbeliever. Don’t mind me calling you Merrily, do you, Reverend? I feel I know you, after talking to Bernie.’
‘Whatever’s he been saying?’
‘He just gets anxious about you, poor old devil.’
‘Ah, but he handles anxiety very well,’ said Merrily. ‘It’s part of being a bishop.’
‘You’re not wrong.’ He patted her shoulder, then consulted his watch. ‘Half-four. Fancy nipping over to Weobley for a coffee?’
‘I’d like to, Mr Howe, but I’ve got to… talk to someone.’
‘Charlie. If I can’t be Chief Super any more, I’ll just be Charlie. Least you didn’t call me Councillor Howe.’ He looked sad for a moment, as though his useful life had ended when he retired from the police, which it clearly hadn’t.
‘You’re Chairman of the Education Committee now, aren’t you?’
‘Vice-chairman.’ He put his head on one side, winked at her. ‘As yet. Tell you what, why don’t you come and talk to one of our sub-committees? Tell the beggars a few things they didn’t know.’
‘You think they’d want that?’
‘They never know what they want these days. Think they know what goes on, but they bloody well don’t. I know you’ve got a pretty thankless job. Got to deal with some weird customers.’
‘You’d know all about that.’
‘What, thankless jobs?’
‘I meant weird—’
‘Oh, aye,’ Charlie said. ‘Getting more thankless all the time, policing. I don’t know how they keep going, today’s coppers, with all the restrictions and the human-rights legislation – known criminals laughing at you from behind their slippery lawyers.’
He gazed across the fields towards Wales, sucking air through his teeth. A pillow of cloud lay over the Black Mountains.
‘Your daughter seems to be coping,’ Merrily said.
‘You reckon?’ He looked up at the sky for a moment, as if deciding whether it would be disloyal to take this any further. Then he turned to her. ‘I’ll tell you, Merrily, it was the shock of my life when Anne joined the force. Never told me, you know. Never said a word. Leaves university with a very respectable law degree, moves away, next thing there she is on the doorstep in her uniform.’
‘Not for very long, I imagine.’
‘Oh no. Fast-track, now. Doing undercover work while she was still a PC, out of uniform altogether within a couple of years. Detective Sergeant at twenty-five.’
‘Chief Constable material, then.’
‘Aye,’ Charlie said. His eyes narrowed shrewdly. ‘Don’t get on too well with her, do you?’
‘She tell you that?’
‘No need. When it comes to religion, Anne stands shoulder to shoulder with Brother Morrell. Always been her blind spot.’
‘Hasn’t held her back. Not even in a cathedral city.’
‘No.’ Charlie Howe stood with his legs apart, his back to the horizon. He must have cut an intimidating figure as a detective, framed in the doorway of the interview room. ‘Not as a copper, no.’
Merrily, who’d had two encounters with Charlie’s daughter, didn’t know what to say. She wasn’t sure she could have got on with Annie Howe if the woman had been Mary Magdalene with a warrant card.
Charlie took out his car keys and tossed them from one hand to the other. ‘Didn’t tell Brother Morrell everything, did you?’
‘I doubt it would have helped. What do you think?’
‘Oh no, you’re quite right, it wouldn’t’ve helped at all. But you wouldn’t have brought him out here in the school holidays if there wasn’t something about this issue that had you particularly worried – now, would you?’
Merrily met his eyes: they were deep-sunk but glittery, playing with her.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I don’t really like this kind of thing. New Age stuff I can put up with – a bit of fortune-telling, astrology, meditation. Trying to contact the dead, that’s unhealthy. Let them go, I say.’
‘And where do the dead go, young Merrily? Heaven? Hell? Purgatory?’
‘Leominster, Charlie. Everybody knows that.’
He grinned. ‘Well, you have a think about talking to my subcommittee. I’ll give you a call in a week or two.’
She stood by the old Volvo and watched him drive away in his dusty Jaguar. She thought she liked him but she wasn’t sure if she could trust him – he was a councillor.
Back in the vicarage, she paused under the picture in the halclass="underline" a good-quality print of Holman-Hunt’s The Light of the World. It had been a gift from Uncle Ted, who knew nothing of the lamplit path, and showed Jesus Christ at his most sorrowfully benign. A middle-aged Jesus, laden with experience of humanity at its most depressing.
What am I learning from this? she asked him. Because it seems to me I’m just muddling around, getting up everybody’s noses and not helping a soul.
Summer had never been her favourite season. People expected it to be a time of pleasure: new feathers, cares dropping away like rags. But too often the old feathers refused to fall, and the rags still clung, clammy with sweat.
Inside the house, tiredness came down on Merrily like a tarpaulin. She checked the answering machine – nothing pressing, no Jane – drank half a glass of water and fell asleep on the big old sofa in the drawing room, with Ethel the cat on her stomach.
And dreamed she was back in the church.
It was evening. The sandstone walls were sunset-vivid and the apple glowed hot and red in the hand of Eve in the huge west-facing stained-glass window, and Merrily was standing in a column of lurid crimson light and she could hear her own thoughts as she prayed.
Oh God, please tell me. Is Jane involved in the summoning of the dead? Please tell me. Heads for yes. Tails for no.
Her thumb flicked against old copper; it hurt. The coin rose up sluggishly into the dense air, rose no more than three or four inches and she had to jump back to avoid catching it as it fell. She didn’t see it fall but she saw it land because it appeared dimly on the flags, rolling onto one of the flat tombstones in the floor at the top of the nave, into the gaping, time-ravaged mouth of the skull at its centre.