‘Irene, we were childhood sweethearts. It’s a phase.’
‘A phase.’
‘And like, if you really don’t know if there’s anything left—’
‘On your side. I meant your side. My side I know about.’
‘Oh.’
‘Jane, would I really be sitting here getting all sweaty and embarrassed and stuff, if I wasn’t still…?’
She didn’t say anything. She realised she was smiling.
Realising he’d never really gone away. That her life was full of Eirion cross-references. Although that wasn’t necessarily a good thing, was it? They were young, they were supposed to be putting themselves about. Why was she smiling?
‘It was just a thought, all right?’ Eirion said.
‘Of course, if the dig’s on in Coleman’s Meadow,’ Jane said, ‘I was supposed to be, you know, helping?’
‘And that’s limited, is it, to people who’ve belatedly applied for archaeology courses on account of they’ve been watching Time Team and Trench One and can’t think of any quicker way to get on TV?’
‘Au contraire, Welshman, I believe I can bring to the study of antiquities something new and meaningful.’
‘As distinct from your usual pseudo-pagan New Age bullshit.’
‘And I’m thinking, could I stand this for a whole week?’
‘Jane, you’d love it.’
‘I’ll talk to Mum,’ Jane said.
Somehow excited. Despicable, really.
Sophie, nun-like in her long charcoal-grey coat and her silk scarf, was walking rapidly across the Cathedral Green towards the Castle Street entrance, furled umbrella under her arm.
She lived back there, in one of the posh terraces behind the cloisters and the Cathedral School. Her husband was an architect, semi-retired now, the golf club a second home. An adopted son lived in Canada.
Merrily watched her from the office window. Some domestic crisis? Domestic, for Sophie, usually meant the Cathedral. Which she served. Living within its ambience, more a part of it than any of the bishops she’d worked for. Whatever had happened, it had to be serious for Sophie to be walking away from the Cathedral at not yet one p.m. on a working day.
When she passed out of sight, between the bare trees, Merrily switched on the computer, opened the Deliverance file.
Still just one entry for this month: a vague report of what Huw Owen would call a volatile — poltergeist activity, alleged, at a small warehouse on the Holmer trading estate. Request for assistance withdrawn before it could be checked out. Pity, really. There was always a reason for reported phenomena, always something interesting. But the Deliverance Ministry wasn’t the police; you went where you were invited.
The report, however, would stay on file in perpetuity, in case some future Deliverance adviser should be approached by some future tenant of the premises.
If nothing else, this job gave you a sense of eternity.
If nothing else…? In many ways, Deliverance gave you too much — too much to question, too much strangeness. Too much that seemed to have very little to do with faith and the yearning for transcendence, more with a basic, primeval fear of the unknowable. Sometimes the roles of priest and exorcist didn’t seem wholly compatible.
Time on her hands now, Merrily put the computer to sleep and tapped Al and Sally Boswell’s number in Knight’s Frome into her mobile, to check on the progress of Lol’s Christmas present.
‘Well, I think it’s nearly ready,’ Sally said. ‘Probably tomorrow, all being well.’
‘And I do want to pay the proper price.’
‘Al says you’ll pay what he asks. He’s quite annoyed with Laurence for not telling him sooner about what happened to the other one.’
‘Lol blames himself. Whereas I blame myself because it was smashed on the instructions of a man he was approaching on my behalf.’
‘It was a guitar, Merrily, not some holy relic.’
‘Sally, to Lol, a Boswell guitar is as close to a holy relic as you can get with steel strings.’
Sally laughed and said Al would understand. Al was of Romani descent. The lute-shaped bodies of his guitars contained many different kinds of wood, most of them pulled from the hedgerows and the copses and dingles of the Frome Valley where the Romani used to come annually to pick hops.
Sally, very olde English gentry, said, ‘I probably forgot to mention, he’s finally taken on an apprentice. Becoming more aware of his mortality, perhaps, and the need to pass on his skills. But that does mean he needs to turn out more instruments per annum, if only to pay the boy a reasonable wage. So, you see, they aren’t quite so rare and precious any more.’
‘How about I come over at the weekend? Is a cheque OK?’
‘Do watch out for the floods, though, won’t you, Merrily?’
‘The Frome’s out?’
‘Not yet,’ Sally said, as the office phone began ringing. ‘Well, not here, anyway, but Al tells me he’s seen the snails moving uphill.’
‘What?’
‘Hundreds of them, Al says. It’s an old sign. Slugs, too, apparently. A scramble for higher ground.’
‘Blimey. Look, Sally, I’ll have to go, I’m on my own in the office and the phone’s ringing.’
The Bishop of Baths and Wells? God, who was the Bishop of Bath and Wells now? As Merrily clicked off the mobile, a gust of new rain skated over the window behind her, like brushes on a snare drum, and she glanced over her shoulder. The way you did, now that something as drably prosaic as rain had turned sinister. She picked up the phone.
‘Merrily.’
‘Sophie?’
‘I wonder if you might join me.’
‘Now? Me? Where?’
‘I can meet you on the corner of Castle Street and Quay Street — do you know where I mean? It will take you no more than about three minutes on foot.’
‘Probably need to bring the car, Sophie, I think I’m about to get nicked for outstaying my welcome in King Street. What’s happened?’
‘I’ll meet you in ten minutes, then.’
‘Has something happened?’
A clock ticking at Sophie’s end. A big, old clock.
‘Sophie?’
‘You may not have heard, but there’s been a particularly horrific murder in the city. Or at least—’
‘I heard on the radio, yeah. You mean where the victim was… beheaded?’
Merrily stood up. Down below, Broad Street was like a sepia print, all its colours draining away in the downpour, and the Cathedral Green was deserted.
‘I’m with his widow,’ Sophie said.
12
Throwback
Sophie was waiting in Castle Street under her pink and yellow golf umbrella. Surreal, like a bad dream in which you somehow understood that pink and yellow were the colours of foreboding and death.
‘Nobody here knows yet,’ Sophie said. ‘When it comes out, all hell—’
Her face looked thinner, with hollows. They were alone in what had been the medieval heart of Hereford. No shops here, no obvious public buildings, only timber-gabled cottages and three-storey Georgian town houses. Quiet, except for the beating rain and the murmur of old money, what was left of it.
Never mind Baghdad, think how many heads must’ve rolled routinely down here, below the walls of Hereford Castle.
Merrily had found a parking space near the footpath to the Castle Green. Not a stone left of the castle now, unless some remained in the foundations of these steep, solid, private dwellings, one owned by Sophie and her husband, another by…