Midwinter of the Spirit (45 page)

‘You’re kidding.’

‘Yeah, I’m kidding. I always wear a black suit on Saturdays.’

‘Oh, Christ,’ Jane said. ‘It’s Moon, isn’t it?’

Lol turned right, towards Greyfriars Bridge. She was making a point of not asking him why he’d just swanned into the restaurant like that – looking quite smooth, for Lol. It had been cool, anyway, to play along. Cool, too, that the extreme warmth of her welcome appeared to have shocked him a little.

She grinned. ‘I frightened you, didn’t I?’

‘There’s effusive,’ Lol said, ‘and there’s
effusive
.’

‘Darling, as it happens I was glad to see you.’ There was no way Lol would let her spend the night in C & A’s doorway. ‘What was her face like?’

‘Whose?’

‘Rowenna’s. I couldn’t see, could I? I was busy expressing my delight at your arrival.’

‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I can still taste the mozzarella.’

‘So how did she react?’

‘She looked surprised.’

‘Excellent,’ Jane said.

Lol crossed four lanes of traffic at the lights, foot down. He must be running late. She suspected there were aspects of Lol’s relationship with Moon she didn’t fully understand. Of course, the problem here was that if he’d taken time to come and find her, in his funeral suit, that suggested he was acting on specific instructions from the Reverend Watkins. In the end you couldn’t get away from her, could you?

‘You weren’t just passing, were you, Lol?’

‘Your mum told me where you were having lunch.’

‘Great,’ Jane said dully.

‘She said you’d had a row.’

‘It was a minor disagreement.’

‘Like between the Serbs and the Croats.’

‘What else did she say?’

‘She said a lot of things I’m inclined to let her explain to you personally.’

‘Look,’ Jane said, more harshly than she intended, ‘tell her to fax it or something. I’m not going back.’

‘You bloody are, Jane.’

‘You can’t make me do anything I don’t want to.’

Lol turned left into the crematorium drive. ‘You’re right.’ He sighed. ‘I probably can’t even trust you to stay in the car while I go inside.’

God, he looks so kind of desolate
.

‘Yes, you can,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, Lol.’

Denny had been wrong. The modern crematorium chapel was at least half-full. Distant relatives, he explained to Lol – nosey bastards whose faces he only half remembered. Also, a pair of archaeologist friends of Moon’s from Northumberland, where she’d lived for a couple of years. And Big Viv and her partner, Gary. And the Purefoys, Tim and Anna. And Dick and Ruth Lyden.

And Moon, of course. Moon was here.

Denny had booked a minister. ‘Though she’d probably have preferred a fucking druid,’ he said, seeming uncomfortable and aggressive. He wasn’t wearing his earring; without it he looked less amiable, embittered. He looked like he wanted to hit people. His wife Maggie was here, without the children. She was tall, short-haired and well dressed, and talked to the relatives but not much to Denny. He must be difficult to live with right now.

The minister said some careful things about Moon. He said she was highly intelligent and enthusiastic, and it was a tragic loss, both to her brother Dennis and his family and to the world of archaeology.

Denny muttered and looked down at his feet. Anna Purefoy wept silently into a handkerchief. They sang two hymns, during which Lol gazed at the costly oak coffin and pictured Moon inside it, with her strange, hard hands crossed over her breast. To intensify the experience in this bland place, to make it hurt, he made her say,
I’d like to sleep now, Lol
.

It hurt all the more because he knew that was wrong. She couldn’t sleep. He kept thinking of his dream of the mist-furled Moon in Capuchin Lane, holding the broken heads of the ancestors as she’d held the crow. A dream… like the dreams she’d had of her father. Moon had joined not the ancestors but the grey ranks of the sleepless. When the curtains closed over the coffin, there were tears in Lol’s eyes because he could not love her – had not even been able to help her. It was a disaster.

And it was not over.

Outside, in the foggy car park, Dick Lyden said to Lol, ‘Never seen you in a suit before, old chap,’ then he patted Denny sympathetically on the arm. Denny looked like he wanted to smash Dick’s face in. Lol found the slender, sweet-faced Anna Purefoy at his side.

‘I feel so guilty, Mr Robinson. We should have positively discouraged her. We should have seen the psychiatric problems.’

‘They aren’t always easy to spot,’ Lol said.

‘I taught at a further-education college for a year. I’ve seen it all in young women: manic depression, drug-induced psychosis. I should have
seen
her as she really was. But we were so delighted by her absorption in the farm that we couldn’t resist offering her the barn. We thought she was perfect for it.’

‘You couldn’t hope to understand an obsession on that scale,’ Lol said. He realized it was going to be worse for the Purefoys than for anyone else here, maybe even for Denny. They would have to live with that barn. ‘What will you do with it now?’

‘I suspect it will be impossible to find a permanent tenant. We’d have to tell people, wouldn’t we? Perhaps we could revert to our original plan of holiday accommodation. I don’t know, it’s too early.’

‘Well, good luck,’ Lol said. He wondered if Merrily might be persuaded to go up there and bless the barn or something. He watched the Purefoys walk away to their Land Rover Discovery. Denny’s wife, Maggie, was chatting to an elderly couple, while Denny stood by with his hands behind his back, rocking on his heels. A lone crow, of all birds, flew over his head and landed on the roof of the crematorium, and stayed there as though it was waiting for Moon’s spirit to emerge in the smoke, to accompany it back to Dinedor Hill.

But nobody could
see
the smoke in this fog – and the way to Dinedor would be obscured. He imagined Moon alone in that car park, after everyone had gone. Moon cold in the tatters of her medieval dress – bewildered because there was nobody left. Nobody left to understand what had happened to her.

The Astra was parked about fifteen yards away. As he approached, Jane’s face appeared in the blotched windscreen, looking very young and starved. He tried to smile at her; she looked so vulnerable. It was cold in the car as he started the engine.

She said, ‘Lol, that woman you were talking to…’

‘Mrs Purefoy?’

‘The blonde woman.’

‘That was Moon’s neighbour and landlady, Anna Purefoy.’

He drove slowly out of the car park on dipped headlights.

Jane said, ‘You mean Angela.’

‘I thought it was Anna. I could be wrong.’

‘Moon’s neighbour?’

‘On Dinedor Hill. They own the farm where she died.’

After a while, as the car crept back into the hidden city, Jane said, ‘Help me, Lol. Things have got like horribly screwed up.’

42

The Invisible Church

T
HE GOLDEN
S
ANTAS
drove their reindeer across a thick sea of mist in Broad Street. The lanterns glowed red like fog warnings. In the dense grey middle-distance, the Christmas trees twinkling above the shop fronts were like the lights of a different city.

And Merrily, alone in the gatehouse office, with the Cathedral on one side and the Bishop’s Palace on the other, felt calmer now because Lol had called her before she left. Because Jane was with Lol in the flat above John Barleycorn, not three minutes’ walk away, and maybe Lol would now find out how far it went, this liaison with the wan and wispy Rowenna, serial seducer of priests.

Scrabbling about under Sophie’s desk, she found an old two-bar electric fire with a concave chrome reflector, plugged it in and watched the bars slowly warm up, with tiny tapping sounds, until they matched the vermilion of the lanterns outside.

Merrily stood by the fire, warming her calves and watching the lights. They were all part of Christmas, but anyone who didn’t know about Christmas would not see them as linked.

She thought about that devil-worshipper pulled from the river not half a mile from here… the strings of crow-intestine on a disused altar… the inflicted curse of Denzil Joy… the old exorcist lying silent, half-paralysed – or faking it – in a hospital bed inside a chalked circle. And, inevitably, she thought of Rowenna.

Linked?
All of them? Some of them? None of them?

After a while she spotted the untidy man – in bobble-hat, ragged scarf, RAF greatcoat – shambling out of the fog, with his exorcist’s black bag, and wondered how many answers he could offer her.

Jane had decided to clean up Lol’s flat: ruthlessly scrubbing shelves, splattering sink-cleaner about, invading the complexity of cobwebs behind the radiators.

A purge
, Lol thought.

Just as they were hitting the city centre, she’d asked if they could go somewhere: the village of Credenhill, where the poet Traherne had been vicar in the seventeenth century. Where the SAS had, until recently, been based. And where, just entering dusk, he and Jane had found the perfectly respectable but undeniably small Army house where Rowenna’s family lived. Until the last possible moment, Jane had been vainly searching for some rambling, split-level villa behind trees.

She’d stood for a long time at the roadside, looking across at the fog-fuzzed lights of the little house with the Christmas tree in its front window. ‘Why would she lie? Why would she think it mattered to me if she lived in a mansion or bloody tent? Why does she
lie
about everything?’

On the way back, Lol considered what Merrily had said on the phone about Rowenna’s sexual history. It had made him look quickly – but very hard – at the girl over Jane’s shoulder in Slater’s. Rowenna was pale, appeared rather fragile – fragile like glass.

Once they were back in his flat, he’d told Jane about the events in Salisbury.

Jane had listened, blank-faced, silent. Then she stood up. ‘This flat’s in a disgusting state.’

Lol sat with Anne Ross’s
Pagan Celtic Britain
open on his knees, and let Jane scrub violently away at the kitchen floor and her own illusions. In the book, he read that crow-goddesses invariably forecast death and disaster.

At last, Jane came back from the kitchen, red-faced with exertion and inner turmoil.

Lol put the book down.

‘I’m not going to be able to live with any of this,’ Jane announced.

‘But you still shafted me.’

Merrily was feeling her fury reignite – reflected in the red glow of the tinking electric fire, the sparky glimmerings from the Santas over Broad Street.

Trust in God, but never trust a bloody priest.

‘You claimed you hardly knew him.’

Huw had taken off his scarf, but left his woolly hat on. They were sitting at opposite ends of Sophie’s long desk under the window. Huw was just a silhouette with a bobble on top. You had to imagine his faded canvas jacket, his shaggy wolfhound hair.

‘I
don’t
know Dobbs,’ Huw said, ‘and I never tried to shaft you.’

She shook her head and lit a cigarette, staring out of the window. It was after six now and the traffic was thinning out. A granny and grandad kind of couple were walking a child down Broad Street towards All Saints, the child between them hopping and swinging from their hands under the decorations.

‘I’m trying to explain,’ Huw said. ‘I want to give you a proper picture, as far as I can see it. They didn’t want me to tell you, but there’s no way round that now, so balls to them.’

‘Who didn’t?’

‘The canons, the Dean’s Chapter – well, not officially. None of this is
official
.’

‘No kidding.’

‘Two fellers came to see me. No,’ raising a shadowy hand, ‘don’t ask. But they’re honourable blokes.’

‘As Mark Antony once said.’

‘Jesus!’ Huw thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. ‘Merrily, there is
no
conspiracy. These lads are scared. They didn’t know what Dobbs was at, but it put the wind up them. Give us one of them cigs, would you?’

She slid the packet across the desk to him. ‘Didn’t know you did.’

‘You know bugger all about me – nor me about you, when we cut to the stuffing. Ta, lass.’ Huw shook the packet, extracted a cigarette with his teeth. ‘The Devil, what’s
he
like these days?’

‘What?’

‘The Devil, lass.’

Merrily said, ‘Forked tail, cloven hooves, little horns – deceptively cuddly. And we invented him to discredit the pagan horned god Cernunnos. This is what Jane tells me, over and over.’

‘Canny lass.’ Huw extended his cigarette towards her Zippo, and in its flare she saw his grainy bootleather features flop into a smile. ‘Like her mam.’

‘Thank you.’

And then the smile vanished. ‘So…’ He drew heavily. ‘What do
you
believe?’

‘I do accept the existence of a dark force for evil,’ Merrily said steadily.

Huw nodded. ‘Good enough.’

When he had first arrived, she’d told him about the projection of the fouled phantom of Denzil Joy: how they’d done it, how well it had worked. She’d told him about the burning of the vestments, and the eucharist she planned for Denzil and Denzil’s mute, abused wife. She was telling him because she needed him to know she was clean, able to deal with things.

Huw started now to talk about evil in its blackest, most abstract form. Evil, the
substance
. How it was always said that the deepest evil was often to be found in closest proximity to the greatest good. How Satanists would despoil churches for the pure intoxication of it, the dark high it gave them.

‘And does that explain St Cosmas?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve not told Dobbs about that. He smelled it on me, mind, that night. Knew I’d just done an exorcism. Happen that’s what got him talking.’

‘Ah,’ Merrily sat up, ‘so Dobbs
has
talked to you.’

‘Only in bits, till last night. The other times he were weighing me up, getting the measure of me. See, what he’s done is he’s shut himself down, boarded himself up, put himself into a vacuum. Working out whether he was going to snuff it or be fit enough to go back. I figured it was my job to give him the space he needed. To see he wasn’t pestered – you know what I’m saying?’