‘I wasn’t prying.’
‘No, really, you have every right to pry. It’s not fair arriving somewhere being mysterious. People want to know. People need to know. Mystery wastes everyone’s time.’ He glanced at her, little smile. ‘And, er… I gather from my wife that you’re not just a vicar.’
‘Nobody’s just anything, Mr Winterson.’
‘Suppose you don’t like talking about it. Understandable.’
‘No,’ Merrily said. ‘Not at all. It’s usually more a case of people who don’t like asking me about it. Think I must be a bit weird.’
‘Surely not,’ Mathew Stooke said.
She could almost see the hot coals being laid out for her to walk along. There were, of course, ways of explaining Deliverance that even an atheist would buy… almost.
She was thinking about Nigel Saltash, the consultant psychiatrist introduced by Canon Siân Callaghan-Clarke to help modernise Hereford’s deliverance module. Saltash with his trim beard, his sports car and his undisguised disdain for the paranormal, which you could very plausibly translate into terms like mental imbalance and psychological projection and then go on to discuss the many forms of schizophrenia. On the other hand, that was the coward’s way out, and Nigel Saltash hadn’t lasted the course.
‘Well, somebody has to do it,’ Merrily said.
‘Really.’
‘At least one person in every diocese, sometimes a group or a panel. We’re very aware of the need to avoid sensationalism, which is one reason it isn’t talked about much.’
‘People gossip, though. I mean locally.’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Perhaps because you’re not exactly the archetypal exorcist, are you?’
‘Big hat and a black bag? That would be the Jesuits. In the movies.’
‘Untypical?’
‘If you start seeing the demonic everywhere, you can very soon lose your balance. Mostly it’s about helping people who feel… threatened by conditions they’re living in.’
‘You make it sound like rising damp.’
Merrily shrugged. Talked about hauntings and perceived hauntings.
‘Meaning it all has a rational explanation?’
‘Sometimes it does. You need to be aware of that. But, to paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, once you’ve eliminated the rational…’
‘You enjoy it?’
They’d stopped by the galvanised gate, blocking the path which led up Cole Hill. Nobody had ever asked that before.
‘I think it’s worthwhile,’ she said.
‘And when you’re confronted by someone who believes that he or she is afflicted by some… paranormal presence, what exactly do you do? How do you establish if they’re telling the truth? Or at least what they perceive to be the truth.’
‘Depends on the circumstances. I might begin by just praying with them. Which often proves effective without recourse to… further measures. And sometimes indicates to me whether what I’ve been told is the truth.’
And didn’t it sound feeble?
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘the power of prayer.’
‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask if you’ll be coming to church.’ Merrily checked herself. Would at least agnosticism be a safe assumption, based on his attitude so far? She could hear the sluggish rumble of a generator, overlaid by laughter from inside one of the tents, squeals, a cry of mock protest. Quite young, some of these archaeologists. Maybe students.
‘You get good congregations, Merrily? Despite church attendance being generally in decline?’
‘Less so in rural areas. Rural people are always closer to… Anyway, I try not to count heads. And just because traditional services are in decline—’
She broke off again, frowning, her memory for some of Stooke’s more cutting put-downs becoming almost photographic.
Christianity only hangs on because of the general mental laziness of congregations and its continuing mix ’n’ match reinvention by the Church of England.
‘And anyway,’ she said, ‘it isn’t just there for services. Or just for Sunday. Some people prefer to come in on their own, sit and think, walk around. We’ll always need places where people can do that.’
He didn’t reply. She looked up into the spongy sky as plump new raindrops landed on her cheeks.
‘I think I need to get back. It’s starting to…’
Fastening her coat over the dog collar, realising what was happening. Drawing up her hood and pulling it across her face, as if it could conceal her thoughts.
‘Sorry if I’ve delayed you, Merrily.’
‘No, you—’
‘I’ve enjoyed talking to you,’ Mathew Stooke said as the heavens opened. ‘Very much.’
Once Merrily was out of sight of Coleman’s Meadow, she headed directly for the main track and the orthodox route to the village centre, walking faster and then almost running through the sheeting rain, getting rapidly out of breath until, halfway up Old Barn Lane, she had to slow down because the water, in places, was flowing around her in a brown tide, almost ankle deep.
She stood panting on the edge of the pavement. Her hood had been blown back, her hair was soaked and water was dripping into her eyes as she walked miserably into Church Street.
Dawkins, you watched him on TV, you sensed the sneer. Come on, you felt him saying, with a certain embittered weariness, hate me. Hate me because you know I’m right.
But Stooke… Stooke was nothing like his book. Polite, defer-ential, self-deprecating. God, she’d almost liked him. Maybe had liked him.
She walked into the square, by the side of the Christmas tree, not yet lit, although shop lights blazed defiantly. No human life on the cobbles. It was one of those days when you wouldn’t even notice the onset of darkness.
And somehow she’d allowed Mathew Stooke to interview her. Done a few interviews with journalists in the past; there was always curiosity about deliverance. What they’d later written was sometimes cynical but usually fair.
But Stooke didn’t do articles, he did books, and he didn’t do fair. Bliss had said, He wants a bit of privacy to finish his next… whatever shite he’s working on now. Even Lol had warned her to leave him alone. But she couldn’t, could she? She’d taken his presence personally. All the picturesque backwaters. Just had to go and find him, put herself through the test.
And now he’d contrived to interview her. Just like his wife had interviewed Jane.
Merrily hurried into the drive, past a parked car, both its doors opening. When she reached the front door, she half-turned to find her key and found two people behind her in the wet and muddied half-light.
A woman in a bulky blue fleece and a woollen hat. A blond-haired man in his twenties, ready with his ID.
‘Mrs Watkins?’
‘Yes?’
‘DI Brent, West Mercia CID. This is DS Dowell. May we come in?’
Dowell? Karen Dowell? Pushing wet hair out of her eyes, Merrily peered at the woman: stocky, pink-cheeked, thirtyish. Bliss’s bagman, right? Bliss always spoke well of Karen. And yet…
She wasn’t smiling; she looked tense, her face overlaid in Merrily’s thoughts with stark and grainy images from dark dramas and fly-on-the-wall police documentaries.
And one recalled instant of frozen reality. May we come in?
When they said that it was never good news.