‘I’ve always liked the way you underplay a drama, Huw.’
Trying to psych out if there was even a hint of a smile on his cratered face as he sat by the racing flames in the inglenook of his eyrie in the Brecon Beacons. Smuggled out of his native Wales by his mother as a small child and brought up in Yorkshire, Huw was back in the land of his unknown father, supervising Deliverance courses for C of E clergy in a former Nonconformist chapel burned out by decades of hellfire preaching – the place where it had begun for Merrily, this weird ministry, not quite as long ago as it sometimes seemed.
‘All right, maybe I’m exaggerating,’ Huw said. ‘I’m just warning you to watch your back. Where the royals are concerned – the royals and Canterbury – the smallest rumour can cause a seismic shift, and little folks like you can get dropped down the nearest crevice.’
‘Thanks, Huw. I’ll sleep so much easier tonight.’
‘I’m just telling you.’
‘So …’ Merrily shifted the heavy bakelite phone from one ear to the other. ‘Having established that nobody in ermine or a dog collar is to be trusted, what’s your considered opinion of why Canterbury would need to be kept informed about a house owned by the Duchy of Cornwall that’s alleged to be haunted?’
‘Well, they wouldn’t, would they?’
‘Would they tell the Prince, or would they try to keep it from him in case he became too curious?’
‘I think if he is curious, he’s probably experienced enough now to keep it to himself. Happen what’s more important – like your feller at the Duchy said – is that the press don’t get wind of it. They’d hound the builder and then they’d hound you.’
‘Mmm.’
‘You ask me, this is just Bernie Dunmore covering his own back. Thinking how it might rebound on the Diocese if it all went pear-shaped.’
And it did go pear-shaped sometimes, no denying that. An inexact science, deliverance. Well, not a science at all, obviously …
‘Everybody lives in fear nowadays,’ Huw said. ‘Way things are going, deliverance itself could be C of E history in a year or two.’
‘And what would you do, Huw, if we all got the elbow?’
‘I’d retire, lass. Take the pension, rent a little shack at the rough end of Sennybridge, with a back yard and a bog, and carry on with the job. No bureaucracy, no politics, no farcical PC synods. Just me and the naked cross.’
‘Talking of which … Canon Dobbs.’
‘Old bugger’s dead.’
‘Sophie’s given me a collection of news cuttings he kept about the Prince of Wales and the Church and other connections. Why would Dobbs keep a royal scrapbook?’
‘Traditionalist of the first order, Dobbs. Happen he’d started to notice the lad spreading his favours. I wouldn’t worry about it. Concentrate on covering your own arse.’
‘And your specific advice, as my spiritual director, would be …?’
‘Keep all your cards on the table, face up.’
Merrily shook out a Silk Cut.
‘Explain?’
‘Stage one: find the former owners of this hovel and see what kind of recent history it’s got. Forget the White Lady and the Phantom Stagecoach. The home movies you can do without.’
Home movies: Huw’s latest euphemism for place-memories and trapped events that repeated themselves.
‘And then … if it’s just what the girl claims she saw and there’s nowt blindingly obvious from the last few years, Stage Two would be to set up a low-key house-blessing for a specific date. Being careful, mind, to invite the local incumbent.’
‘There isn’t one. A retired guy’s holding the fort.’
‘He’ll do. Also, you want at least one member of the family – the folks who flogged the place off to the Duchy, plus, if possible, someone from the family as owned it before. For many generations, you said?’
‘So I’m told.’
‘That would help, then. And finally – this is important – you must formally request the presence of an official of the Duchy of Cornwall. The higher up the better.’
‘Wow.’ Merrily sat back, lit her cigarette. ‘Smart.’
‘That way, you’ve acquitted yourself in full view, and they’re all involved – all implicated.’
‘Flawless.’
It wouldn’t be, of course. It was never that easy.
‘And what do you do after that?’ Huw said.
‘I don’t know. What do I do after that, boss?’
‘You bugger off out of it just as fast as your cute little legs will carry you.’
‘What about the woman? Fuchsia. Aftercare?’
‘Oh, aye.’
There was a lengthy, meditative silence. She imagined him staring down at his peeling slippers, their rubber soles smoking on the edge of the hearth.
‘You do need to separate it,’ he said eventually. ‘If there’s nowt particularly to support it at the house, you most likely are looking at a different problem. You said she was orphaned?’
‘Abandoned. She’s certainly had personal problems. Maybe the house brought something to a head?’
‘Possible. How was the blessing?’
‘Curious. There wasn’t the normal sense of relief afterwards. In fact, she looked up, as if something might have followed us into the church. Said something like, is something coming? Something like that. And laughed. I mean, it’s always a problem, isn’t it? You can never be quite sure when somebody’s winding you up.’
‘Happen include her in your prayers when you do the cleansing. Something moving around under the carpet, was that what you said?’
‘Dust sheets. I suppose a shrink would be talking about demons in her past that she’s covered up. Perhaps she just has a Gothic imagination: the wriggling under the sheets, the face of crumpled linen. She’s also obviously read a fair amount about healing and deliverance, because she knew exactly what she—’
‘Hang on … Gimme that again, lass.’
‘What?’
‘Crumpled linen. A face of crumpled linen?’
‘That’s the image Fuchsia claims she saw when she turned around from the wall she was plastering. Poetic, in its macabre way. Although this would’ve been crumpled plastic.’
‘Aye. Very literary,’ Huw said. ‘But, then, not surprising, really. It’s a quote.’
‘What?’
‘M. R. James. Author of classic ghost stories in the 1900s?’
‘Yeah, I know who M. R. James is.’
‘I can even tell you which story it comes from. “Whistle”.’
‘What are you—?’
‘“Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” is the one about the university professor haunted by a malevolent entity which … I’d get hold of a copy if I were you, without too much delay.’
‘You’re saying …’
There’d been a book of James’s stories amongst Fuchsia’s collection in the caravan. Orange-coloured spine on the shelf by the wood stove. Ghost Stories of an Antiquary.
‘All right, lass?’
‘Let me get this totally right. You’re telling me it’s an actual phrase taken from one of M. R. James’s ghost stories?’
Merrily dropped her cigarette in the ashtray and flopped forward, both hands around the old black phone.
Oh, bugger.
‘Bit of a coincidence, eh? If you have any problems finding the story, give us a call and I’ll scan a few pages and email them across.’