Friends of the Dusk (12 page)

‘Did she?’

‘No. Nor did she go back to the Church. Any church. Just carried on helping farmers with their accounts and then moved in with one for a while, but Huw doesn’t think it worked out. He talked to her on the phone as well, but she wouldn’t see him.’

‘Huw talk to Innes about it?’

‘Yes, well, he would, wouldn’t he? Innes shrugged it off. Needed to pull herself together. Be strong in the Lord. If she can’t deal with her own psychological phantoms, she isn’t fit to be ordained. No room for neurotics in the pulpit.’

‘So, in other words, he shafted her entire—’

‘See, I didn’t want to
think
that!’ Merrily throwing up her arms. ‘All the times I’ve been warned about people only to find they’ve been bad-mouthed by someone with an axe to grind.
I mean, even Huw… even Huw’s not a saint. He has an ego, kind of.’

‘Has Innes done that to anyone else?’

‘I don’t know.’ Her arms flopped. ‘Presumably. He wasn’t a deliverance minister for long. I think he just wanted to find out about the more primitive aspects of the Church, maybe with a view to… I don’t
know
. Huw sent me a link to several articles Innes wrote that you can find on the Net. One supporting the removal of references to the devil in the baptism service. Can’t have primitive superstition inflicted on babies. The Devil is a medieval term beyond which we’ve progressed. He likes that word “medieval”. Or rather
doesn’t
like it.’

‘They did that, didn’t they. Dropped the devil from baptism.’

‘He was surfing a tide. Riding the zeitgeist. The Devil had to go. Well, I’m not some kind of throwback, I hope, but I was unhappy about that. Were you here then, I can’t remember?’

‘I was still on tour. You talked about it on the phone. I probably didn’t realize the significance.’

‘It’s the fact that a baptism is also an exorcism. The old services reject the Devil and the deceit and corruption of evil. Now all we do is we “turn away from sin”. Hey, kids, let’s just look the other bloody way. Don’t worry your little heads about all that crap.’

‘Oh.’ Hadn’t seen her like this in a while. ‘So this is symbolic of how Innes feels about exorcism.’

‘We assume.’

‘And can he… if he wants to, can he actually wind it down, in his diocese? Or even…’

She shrugged.

‘Somebody has to do it until they actually persuade some wimpy synod to abolish the whole thing.’

‘But that…’ Lol took a long breath. ‘… that means not necessarily you, right? He might want someone who thinks the Devil should be pensioned off.’

‘Mmm.’

‘Can he do that? Fire you?’

She leaned back with her hands behind her head.

‘Firing a vicar is not easy. Even with good reason. An exorcist, however… See, I’m not licenced to be an exorcist. Nobody is. There’s nothing on paper. I’m doing a job for the Bishop.’

‘What’s that mean?’

‘Means that if you’re not officially there, then…’ Snap of the fingers. ‘Gone. Like that. Whenever he wants. He can replace me tomorrow, if he wants, with someone who thinks people convinced they’ve seen images of the dead are in need of Prozac.’

‘Shit,’ Lol said. ‘After everything you’ve been through?’

‘I’ve made mistakes, a whole pile of mistakes.’

‘Sure, but— How else do you get experience?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Without making mistakes.’

He stared down at the rag rug. Merrily’s extra job, what Jane had called the Night Job… he hadn’t known her all that well when she’d first accepted it but he knew it wasn’t something she’d welcomed. He remembered that first winter, shock upon shock. Merrily, who knew nothing compared with what she knew now, having repeatedly to find the demarcation line between the rational and psychological and the stuff that even the clergy didn’t have to accept.

Baptism of ice.

‘Everything you’ve learned, all the knowledge you’ve acquired,’ Lol said. ‘If he sacks you as his exorcist, he’ll just be throwing all that away.’

‘Lol, you’re not getting it, are you?’

‘That’s what he wants?’

‘Bin it.’ Merrily sagged into the sofa. ‘Anachronistic crap. Turn away. Turn the page.’

Lol sat on the hearth next to the stove.

‘I’ve never seen you look so gutted.’

The walls were furnace orange, stabbed by shadows, like a
naive, picture-book hell. He’d wanted to ask her if she knew what was wrong with Jane, but he could hardly do that now.

‘I’m not very good company tonight,’ Merrily said. ‘I’ll get over it.’

Part Two

If we want to gauge aright the mind of the community… we must turn to the oral traditions, the institutions and practices of the peasant and the labourer. These are things the law barely recognizes. The Church frowns on them, ignores them or tolerates them as she tolerates Dissenters – with scorn and dislike, because she must. Yet they survive…

E. Sidney Hartland.
Introduction to Ella Mary’s Leather’s
The Folklore of Herefordshire
, 1912

18

A war

S
HE LEFT THE
Freelander on bare ground at the dead end where a barbed-wire fence restrained the forestry. The temperature had dropped in the night, and the morning was raw. Had to happen sometime. She dragged out her Barbour for the first time this autumn but left the airline bag in the well behind the driving seat.

Now where? Merrily stepped away from the car and looked around. The sky was bright but clouded. The air smelled of smoke. Crows were jeering from somewhere. To her left, a wooden footbridge crossed a brook before a steepening path wound up to where the ruins were partly caged by trees. Someone else’s tyre tracks curved away to the right, vanishing behind a thorn hedge, and she followed them up to the sign, less visible by day than it had been in the headlights:
Cwmarrow Court.

A short way up the track was a pair of gates – old wood faded to grey, Gothic loops overhung by thorn and holly trees – and a wooden mailbox hanging from a post like one of those gibbets from which dead crows used to be hung. As she walked over, pulling on her coat, a man in blue overalls and a stained wide-brimmed hat came through a gap between the trees.

‘Mrs Watkins?’

His voice was loud, more landowner than workman. He beamed through white stubble, opening the gates for her, extending a big hand.

Merrily pushed her right hand out of a once-waxed sleeve.

‘Mr Kellow.’

Was
it? She’d Google-imaged Dennis Kellow, the heritage builder, and in all five pictures he’d been big and bronze. This man didn’t look that big and his face was stretched and battered-looking.

‘We don’t’ – he pulled the gates to behind her – ‘invite traffic. Not since some bloody urbanite claimed he’d ruined his suspension on the track and sent us a solicitor’s letter. The compensation culture. Try anything these days.’

‘How did that end?’

‘On the fire. Now.’ He stood looking down at her, rubbing his leathery hands together. ‘We haven’t met before, have we?’

‘Don’t think so.’

‘It’s just that people I haven’t seen for years often don’t recognize me. Lost a lot of weight. Quite deliberate. Not, you know, a
side-effect
of anything.’

He pulled off his well-worn hat to show he still had hair and quite a lot of it, off-white and brushed back, manelike. He put the hat back and they shook hands.

‘Sorry about Adam, m’dear. He’s normally very reliable. Bloody hospital exploits his enthusiasm.’

‘Right.’

When she’d rung from home, just before nine, to make sure she was expected, Adam Malik had said that unfortunately he was on his way out. Quite rare to be called into the hospital on a Saturday morning, but there’d been a bad crash on a notorious hill on the Leominster road, several badly broken bones. He was so sorry. Would she mind awfully talking to his father-in-law, who actually knew more than he did about this… issue? Merrily thinking, as she left, that Adam Malik hadn’t sounded all that sorry that he wouldn’t be there.

‘Now,’ his father-in-law said. ‘Would you like some tea or coffee, or should I show you around first and let things just come out in their own way? Don’t know how much time you have. Afraid I don’t really know the formula for this sort of thing.’

‘Oh… well… there isn’t one, really. It starts with you explaining what the problem is. Then I see if I can help, and how, and then you decide if that’s the way you want to go. Tea, yes, that would be good, thank you, Mr Kellow.’

‘Dennis. I’m Dennis. Mellowed, you see.’ A short laugh, and then he set off up the dirt drive, where you could see a stone chimney stack above the trees. ‘Forced to bloody well mellow by my own—’ He stopped. ‘Sorry, m’dear, with you not wearing a dog collar, one tends to—’

‘If you’d heard what I said the day I dropped a bottle of communion wine on the chancel step…’

He smiled.

‘Which church?’

‘Ledwardine.’

‘Rood screen with apples?’

‘Gosh.’

‘Merrily, I know them all. Used to drop in unsummoned occasionally and spot problems with the fabric. Make a note of the worst on the back of one of my business cards and drop it in the offertory box. They’d call back, eventually. “
That bad?
” Aghast, invariably. “And where the hell are we expected to find that much money?” I was regarded as the Angel of Death.’

‘Don’t think I’ve ever found a card in my box. Plenty of big cracks in the walls, mind.’

‘Who, as you know, I almost ran into.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Angel of Death.’ He carried on walking, a bit slower this time, through the remains of an orchard, misshapen apple-trees with wizened fruit and blackened cages of mistletoe in their upper branches. ‘No time for
that
bastard. Hence the weight loss. Prescribed pills and some dreadful marge that’s supposed to lower one’s cholesterol – couldn’t stand the stuff, so just stopped eating almost everything. Seemed to work.’

‘You’re over it now?’

‘Never been better.’

He didn’t look it.
A stubborn man
, Raji Khan had said.
Promised to take it slowly from now on.

‘Another fifteen years should see it right.’

She looked up at him.

‘The house,’ he said. ‘Got to finish the bloody house. To a level. Before I die.’

Dennis Kellow was breathing heavily. He glanced at Merrily and she looked away. The track had stopped rising and outbuildings of wood and stone were shambling out of the undergrowth on either side, some semi-ruined. There was a metal barn with one side missing and an elder tree growing out of it, and a roofless granary supported by steel girders. The buildings were like crippled old retainers, kept on unworked.

‘How much land, Dennis?’

‘One hundred and two acres. Most of the valley. We let most of it for grazing. There
are
other farms not far away, just can’t see them from here. There was once a village. Down there, you can still find the remains of homes, overgrown, some with only foundations, buried in woodland.’

He looked all around, as if searching for signs in the valley’s tangle.

‘Maybe not a village the way we think of them now, but certainly more than a hamlet.’

The track had opened out into a yard, part cobbled, part tarmac, part baked mud. A dented old Defender and a Mercedes four by four were parked outside a house that didn’t look like the kind of house that would ever get finished.

‘Kellow’s folly.’

He stood staring at it, as if he couldn’t believe what he’d acquired: a long, crouching house built of rubble-stone the colours of a muddy fox. Irregular windows, some mullioned, two with oaken vertical bars, a roof of stone tiles all the shades of an autumnal paint chart.

‘Most of what you see is fifteenth and sixteenth century. Some of what you
can’t
see is thirteenth, possibly earlier. Much
of the stone would’ve come from…’ Dennis Kellow half turned, extending an arm. ‘… that.’

She turned, too.

‘Blimey.’

The landscape had locked them in; there was only one view left, intimate and yet awesome, directed to an obvious focal point across the wooded valley. Under a sky like tallow, the remains of Cwmarrow Castle poked like a bony fist out of the trees. Weak sun gleamed like sweat on the distant sawn-off tower. Crows were circling it like specks of soot.

‘Already falling into ruins when medieval England became Tudor England,’ Dennis Kellow said. ‘Old castles became stone quarries for farms like this.’

‘How much left?’

‘Not much beyond half a tower and a receding wall. That’s it now. One of the few things English Heritage gets right is to leave these places alone. Don’t let them fall down, but never build them back up. What’s done’s done.’

‘Respect.’

‘Yes.’ He looked down at her, smiling. ‘And hope you get some back.’ The smile vanished. ‘This is what you buy. Cwmarrow. All of it. The whole place, intact. A medieval microcosm. Something magical.’

‘Yes.’

‘Can’t leave now, m’dear. It’s as if my whole life was leading up to this. Still. In spite of everything. Actually,
because
of everything. Can’t let it win.’

‘It’s a contest?’

She looked up at him with concern.

‘I think it’s more of a war, now,’ he said.

‘Between you and… what?’

He didn’t reply.

19

Hicksville

N
EIL
C
OOPER WAS
a man in transition. Boxes everywhere in his big old flat, a few of them wooden. Bliss upturned one and sat down on it so as to appear unthreatening.

‘So how close
were
you to Tristram Greenaway, Neil?’

‘Close?’ Cooper seemed to flinch, which was interesting. ‘I work— worked with him. I didn’t, you know, socialize with him.’

‘Know anybody who did?’

‘Well, no, he… he didn’t talk much about his… his private life. Not to me, anyway.’

Neil Cooper’s flat was over a shop in a Victorian building in St Owen’s Street, close to the city centre. Though not for long; he’d told Bliss he and his growing family were moving next week to a new house, a few miles away at Hampton Bishop. The wife and kids were staying with the in-laws till most of the furniture was installed. Cooper said he’d spent most of last night at the new place, only came back this morning to collect more stuff, which was when he’d picked up the messages the police had left on his machine. He’d phoned Gaol Street without delay but learned nothing until Bliss had arrived with Vaynor.