Friends of the Dusk (32 page)

Uh-oh.

Jane scrolled deep into the site and there were several other references to Geraint and his hammer. Predictable. Close to the kind of crap she might have written years ago. Mystic Jane from the University of Middle Earth.

After Aisha’s post, other people on the Fang Forum started posting about Foxy Rowlestone’s book, some of them claiming to have seen the Summoner. Jane remembered Lol talking once about the time he’d spent in psychiatric care and how easy it was to absorb other patients’ kinks, how easy to accept your own insanity and hold it close with medication. Easier than breaking out. Swallow the orange-coloured pill.

She stood up and went back to the window, watched the village stretching itself into the cool, clear morning. Gus Staines, plump and comfy, was walking past the vicarage gate with her wife, the taller, narrower Amanda Rubens. Off to open the bookshop. They looked like extras from one of those old British films where the colours always seemed washed-out.

Jane turned violently away from the window. Back at her desk, she found a reply to Aisha.

And that was all there was. Maybe there was some take-up on one of the other groups that hadn’t got back to her. She was still waiting when her phone, over on the window ledge, made the tawny owl noise. Jane came slowly to her feet, walked over and found a text. Businesslike.

Jane looked down, between the trees, to Ledwardine square, the white walls brighter than neon between the black oak, but she could taste the sour autumnal air of Cwmarrow as the owl returned. New text.
Not
businesslike. This one was like poetry.

43

Get rid

U
NUSUALLY WITH
H
UW
O
WEN
in the room, the air was flecked with unrest. It was far from reassuring that he’d sat, unmoved, through the part where Innes had called him mad. Past the age where he’d care. Content to be crazy, nothing he needed to prove to anyone.
No evangelist, me
, he’d said once.
Let ’em find it for themselves, worth bugger-all otherwise.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Let’s hear the rest.’

Merrily leaned across the desk and tapped the touchpad, releasing the Bishop’s crisp tenor.

‘—an old people’s home at Hardwicke, down hear Hay. The proprietor’s a woman called Mrs Cardelow. Whose son-in-law is one Graeme Spring.’

‘You mean our…?’

‘Canon Graeme Spring.’

‘Spring’s a decent man,’ Merrily said sadly. ‘Not even ambitious. People trust him.’

‘His mother-in-law’s perpetual headache is a woman who was living there when she took over. A former Whitehall civil servant, more recently employed in some capacity at GCHQ in Cheltenham.’

No reaction from Siân, although it was unlikely she hadn’t heard of this woman, even as a joke. Which she wasn’t.

‘Old but far from geriatric. A woman who could afford her own home but appears not to want one. Apart from a recently acquired artificial hip, she has no disabilities. No interest, apparently, in physical possessions – admirable really. Or would be
under normal circumstances. She wants to be looked after. She has a suite of rooms, now, I’m told. Filled, floor to ceiling, with books. All her needs taken care of, so she can continue her studies.’

Huw looked at Merrily.

‘Miss White,’ she said. ‘Anthea. Who prefers to be anagrammed. Athena.’

‘Amongst her studies,’
Innes said,
‘are the other guests in the home. Especially those close to… what you might call the end of their stay.’

‘
The dying
,’ Siân said.

‘That’s… not entirely fair,’ Merrily said. ‘She’s been quite a comfort to… some of them.’

‘Does tarot readings for the other old ladies in the home,’
Innes said.
‘Telling them when they can expect to die.’

Siân tutted once.

‘How horrible of her.’

‘Plays tricks with people’s minds. To exercise her faculties. Also said to be working on her memoirs – not as a civil servant, about which she’s always been very discreet, but as an occultist.’

‘Perhaps I have heard of her,’
Siân said faintly.
‘Though never encountered her personally.’

‘Mrs Watkins certainly has. Visiting her countless times, according to Mrs Cardelow.’

‘Five, max,’ Merrily said. ‘Rarely parting on good terms.’

‘What one might call, Siân – and I really don’t wish to be melodramatic – a rather unholy alliance.’

‘I don’t think we should necessarily—’

‘What you don’t think doesn’t concern me greatly. I know. I see a possible unholy and certainly unhealthy association. To which my predecessor seems to have turned a blind eye. But I shall not. No such thing as white magic, Siân, only spiritual perversion.’

‘What an ambivalent feller he is,’ Huw said. ‘Fire and brimstone modernist.’

He glanced at Merrily, who shrugged.

‘Stop it there, would you, lass?’ Huw said.

Because this might take longer, she closed the document. Not much left anyway.

‘She’s not a friend. That is, we don’t socialize. She doesn’t
have
friends. Too time-consuming. But…’ She sighed. ‘… the fact remains that she
is
extraordinary. As I’ve probably said before, she’s deliberately offensive and can appear heartless… all right, sometimes she
is
heartless. But her breadth of knowledge is vast.’

‘Aye,’ Huw said.

‘And there are some esoteric crevices I’ve never managed to penetrate, and so… there
have
been times when I’ve dragged myself kicking and screaming to Athena’s eyrie.’

‘I know.’

She couldn’t remember how much she’d told him.

‘We go where we have to, lass, to get what we need. We weigh one thing against another. Lesser of two evils. What we don’t do is avoid them, pretend they don’t exist. We go in, eyes open.’

‘I suppose.’

Huw pushed a knuckle into his chin.

‘This feller Spring… the canon… is he the kind of bloke who’d go to Innes to grass you up?’

‘Well, that’s it, I wouldn’t’ve thought so. But then I didn’t know he was Cardelow’s son-in-law.
She’s
never mentioned it to me. Miss White disclosed that there was now a canon in the family, but I never followed up on it. Why would I?’

‘Why indeed, lass. Nowt wrong wi’ an occasional lapse into naivety…’

‘That’s—’

‘Anthea White, she was a proper spook?’

Merrily sighed.

‘When people tell you they were in the civil service, you kind of turn off, so it’s only recently I found out that she’d worked for the security services, MI5, anyway. It makes sense. She’s drawn to secrecy in all its forms. Occult – hidden. She’s hardly the first. Occultism, secrets, codes…’

‘Means she’ll be on somebody’s file, won’t she? Several files. Happen she thinks an old folks’ home’s the safest place for her.’

‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘No, it’s not. People like her, eyes get kept on them. Files get discreetly passed around. MI5 must’ve known what she did on the side. Which might even’ve been useful to them at one time, but once you’re out you can be dangerous.’

Merrily stood up, both hands on the desk.

‘We’re in danger of losing touch with reality.’

Huw didn’t move.

‘Far from it, lass. The Church of England, by tradition, is part of the British government. The whole reason it even exists—’

‘I
do
know why it exists.’

‘And the reason it survives. The reason it will still survive when even cathedral congregations are down to single figures. Contacts. Politics. Church and State, notes passed under the table.’

‘I hate conspiracy theories. Never really wanted to wind up as a crazy hag howling on street corners.’

‘Keep your nerve.’

‘I’m starting to feel almost physically sick. It’s like I’m walking in my own shadow. You can also hear Innes talking about Jane and her blatant paganism. Where’s he got that from? He doesn’t know Jane. And then there’s my
sexual relationship
– not a partnership because we don’t live together – with a musician whose past—’

Huw’s hands were up.

‘All right. I get it. All it means is he has a small but growing coterie of clerical snouts in the diocese, who, between them—’

‘
Who?
Who are they?’

Found she was halfway across the desk. She slumped back into the chair, eyes closed.

‘No idea, lass. Not my diocese. Don’t know who they are, how many of them there are, or if they even qualify as a coterie. But there’ll be a few folks on your side as well. Or there would be if they knew.’

‘That’s so good to know, Huw.’

‘Aye, well, in a situation like this, friends tend to be…’

‘Reticent.’

‘Especially the bloody clergy.’

I just…’ She was feeling almost faint, shook her head hard. ‘This has come… absolutely out of nowhere.’

‘It’s not come out of nowhere. I’ve told you where it’s come from. And it makes you just want to pack in, course it does.’

‘It does, actually. Yes.’

‘Don’t. Just bloody don’t. I’m not saying you won’t get hurt, nowt surer. The Church of England can be like some old-fashioned public school. Bullying is rife. He’ll run you to the edge. But you don’t go
anywhere.
’

‘I—’

‘You tell him where he can stick his rural dean offer. You tell him you want to stay with deliverance.’

‘What, call his bluff? He’s not bluffing, Huw. I won’t bother playing the rest, but I’ll tell you something else. He said he’d never been to Ledwardine, but I saw him here once with his wife and two of his kids, OK? Having an ice cream?’

She hadn’t planned to tell him the rest. It was, after all, not unreasonable considering the income Ledwardine failed to provide for the Church. Dispiriting, but not unreasonable. Huw would accept that.
We bloody suffer. We get extra shit.
It was only when you looked at it alongside the rest…

‘He asks Siân if she can explain why it is that a vicarage this big is housing one woman and, as he puts it, one child. A seventeenth-century black and white vicarage which, if sold, would fetch… he puts a figure on it which is probably an exaggeration, but…’

‘And where would he put you and the child?’

‘The property people have been briefed to keep an eye open for the next semi to come for sale up on what Gomer Parry calls “the hestate”. I can’t complain. If they’d put us into a semi when we first arrived I’d’ve been happy enough. I didn’t like the idea
of a period mausoleum, and it caused me problems. But you kind of stretch out to fill a place, don’t you?’

‘Just try and give me some time,’ Huw said. ‘All right?’

‘To do what?’

‘I don’t know.’ A very visible pain in his eyes. ‘I’ve never lied to you, lass. I don’t bloody know. But it’s clear that if you turn down rural dean, if you don’t say, Wow thank you, Bishop, how kind, I don’t deserve this… then he’ll want you off his patch for good.’

‘If not out of the job. Who’d want me anywhere else?’ She stood up. ‘Need to get a glass of water.’

‘You’re not sleeping, are you?’

‘Not much. Awful dreams. Had one last night… no, the night before… that was a composite of Ann Evans… Jenny… her experience in her father’s church and…
oh God.’

She didn’t get the water. She sat down again and told him, as she’d known she’d have to at some stage, very slowly about her other problem. How she was working a foreigner – a particularly medieval foreigner – at the indirect behest of an Islamic cleric.

And a drug dealer.

She told him everything. The vanished village that had come to a kind of life in an old man’s head. The manifestation/hallucination in the Castle Room. The clocks and the stroke. The bloody fairy stroke.

He listened without a word, as she told him everything. Name, locations, history. The screensaver came up on the computer. It was the cover of Lol’s CD,
A Message from the Morning
, showing the solid electric guitar he rarely played silhouetted against a purple dawn. Picture by Eirion Lewis. Who seemed no longer to be in the picture himself.

Huw had his head on one side, as if what he’d just heard in one ear might drift away out of the other.

‘I didn’t make any of that up, by the way,’ Merrily said.

‘I don’t see how you could.’

‘No.’

‘Dunmore, you’d’ve told him if he were still Bishop?’

‘Probably. I mean, yes.’ She smiled, aware that it was a crooked smile. ‘It’s almost funny, isn’t it?’

Huw wasn’t laughing. Outside, a wind was getting up. She turned and saw the sky over the church wall had become overcast.

‘You need to get rid of it,’ Huw said. ‘Don’t you?’

‘Get rid?’

‘Get it sorted bloody quick and cover your tracks.’

‘How about I just do my best with it? And then go quietly.’

‘Merrily…’

‘What?’

‘I’ll not tell you again.’

44

Walks by night

‘L
OT OF MEDIA
on the car park,’ Elly Clatter, the police press officer, said on the stairs to the MIR. ‘Two murders, we’ll need to give them something substantial. And like I keep saying—’