The Remains of An Altar

Book 8: Merrily Watkins Series

by Phil Rickman, Julie Maisey

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

Merrily Watkins – parish priest, single mother and Deliverance Consultant – heads for the Malvern Hills to investigate an alleged paranormal dimension to a spate of road accidents. A revamped local pub has injected the valley with a shattering surge of inner-city nightlife… and drugs. When a dealer is found savagely murdered below the great earthen hillfort of Herefordshire Beacon, police wonder if it is a gangland disposal, a cry of outrage or something more sinister. Merrily and the police follow separate paths towards the truth until, on a night of frenzied violence, in a place at the centre of an ancient mystery, the final, shocking connections are made.

Release date: September 6, 2007

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 516

Sample

‘Merrily, a fully-drawn heroine and fascinating personality in her own right, acts as the reader’s conduit into this slightly askew world where even exorcists are sceptics and work alongside police, psychiatrists and lawyers. Add a finely sketched portrayal of provincial England and you get a first class thriller with a difference.’

Guardian

‘First rate. A passionate, flawed modern woman, every bit as concerned with the intricacies of crime as with demons that go bump in the night. We don’t praise our home-grown thriller writers enough. It’s high time we praised Phil Rickman.’

Daily Mail

‘As if an episode of The Vicar of Dibley or The Archers had suddenly turned into Cracker.’

Sunday Times

‘Rickman’s strengths, an acute ear for dialogue and a talent for wickedly accurate character cameos, draw one into a story where human frailities and strengths are counterposed. The clever combination of modern idiom and the timeless echo of history leaps from every page. You are there with poor Merrily every step of the way.’

Daily Express

‘I like (Merrily) because she’s got vices – she likes a smoke, she swears when she gets upset … a very rounded character … not easily fooled; she has a gentle manner, but she’s nobody’s pushover.’

Barbara Nadel (on her favourite detectivecharacter), Open Book, BBC Radio 4

‘A highly sophisticated crime novel. Its complex narrative grips like a clamp. Rickman makes us care about his characters and is brilliant at dialogue.’

Andrew Taylor, Crimetime

‘Monumentally ambitious. Merrily links criminal, psychological, moral, sociological, spiritual and supernatural realms to dig deeper into evildoing just when most fictional sleuths would be calling it quits.’

Kirkus Reviews

‘A first class writer. He has the great advantage, for a novelist, that he believes in and can portray good as well as evil.’

Church Times

‘Works brilliantly, combining mysticism, crime and the shadow of terrible real-life events whose influence does indeed linger.’

Pagan Times

‘The Merrily Watkins books are easily the most interesting being written in Britain today.’

Tangled Web

‘Strong sense of place. This is no rural paradise but a setting for an uneasy mix of embittered farmers, escapees from the city and a local pub with a reputation for drug-dealing. It’s probably his best book.’

Sunday Telegraph

More than a day later, there was still wreckage around: a twisted door panel across the ditch and slivers of tyre like shed snakeskin in the grass.

It had rained last night, and the Rev. S. D. Spicer’s cassock was hemmed with wet mud. What might have been a piece of someone’s blood-stiffened sleeve was snagged in brambles coiling like rolls of barbed wire from the hedge. The countryside, violated, wasn’t letting go. It felt to Merrily as if the air was still vibrating.

‘Other vehicle was an ancient Land Rover Defender,’ Spicer said. ‘Must’ve been like driving into a cliff face.’

Ground mist was draped like muslin over the hedges and down the bank and the early sun lit the windows of a turreted house in the valley. Looking back along the road Merrily could see no obvious blind spots, no overhanging trees.

‘Boy died in the ambulance.’ Spicer nodded at the metallic red door panel, crumpled and creased like thrown-away chocolate paper. ‘Took the fire brigade best part of an hour getting him out the car. Fortunately, he was unconscious the whole time.’

Merrily shook her head slowly, the way you did when there was nothing to be said. No act of violence as sudden and savage, massive and unstoppable, as a head-on car crash. She was thinking, inevitably, of Jane and Eirion out at night in Eirion’s small car. One momentary lapse of attention, a snatched caress, and…

‘He was in his mid-twenties. Lincoln Cookman, from north Worcester. The girl … no hurry to get her out. She’d had her window wide open. No seat belt. Head almost taken off on impact. Sonia Maloney, from Droitwich.’

‘Oh God.’ Merrily took a step back. ‘How old?’

‘’Bout nineteen.’ Spicer’s London accent was as flat as a rubber mat. ‘All horribly brutal and unsightly, but mercifully quick. No suffering. Except, of course, for Preston Devereaux.’

‘Sorry, Preston—?’

‘Local farmer and chairman of the parish council. And, as it happened, the driver of the Land Rover. Returning late from a family wedding.’

‘Oh, hell, really?’

‘Could’ve been any of us, Mrs Watkins. Parish Council’s been asking for speed cameras since last autumn. Not that that would’ve made a difference, state these kids must’ve been in. They come over from Worcester, places like that, at the weekends. Windows open, music blasting. Sixty-five, seventy, wrong side of the road. Poor guy’s still reliving it. He’ll need a bit of support – my job, I think.’

‘And what, erm … what’s mine, exactly, Mr Spicer?’

It was a reasonable question, but he didn’t answer. Parish priests would often have difficulty explaining why they’d resorted to Deliverance. Spicer had been terse and cagey on the phone yesterday. Can you come early? Before eight a.m.? In civvies. Best not make a carnival out of it.

OK, just gone 7.50 on a Monday morning, and here she was in discreet civvies: jeans and a sweatshirt. And here’s the Rector, all kitted out: cassock, collar, pectoral cross. Merrily felt wrong-footed. Why would he want that? She’d never met him before, didn’t even know his first name. Never been to this village before, out on the eastern rim of the diocese where it rose into the ramparts of Worcestershire.

‘Well, the point is,’ Spicer said, ‘this is the worst but it’s not exactly the first.’

‘You mean it’s an accident black spot?’

Sometimes, when a stretch of road acquired a reputation for accidents, someone would suggest that a bad pattern had been established, and you’d be asked to bless it. One of those increasingly commonplace roadside rituals, support for all the road-kill wreaths laid out by bereaved relatives – how did all that start? Anyway, it was a job for the local guy, unless there were complications.

‘How many actual accidents have there been, Mr Spicer?’

He didn’t respond. He was standing quite still; shortish and thickset, with sparse greying hair shaved tight to his head and small, blank eyes that seemed to be on his face rather than embedded there. Like a teddy bear’s eyes, Merrily thought. Poor man, Sophie had said last night on the phone. She took the children, of course.

It was as though some part of Spicer had withdrawn, the way a computer relaxed into its screensaver. Not many people could do this in the presence of a stranger – especially clergy who, unless they were in a church, tended to treat silence like a vacuum into which doubt and unbelief might enter if it wasn’t filled with chatter, however inane.

OK, whatever. Merrily let the silence hang and looked up at the tiered ramparts of the sculpted fortress-hill called Herefordshire Beacon, also known as British Camp. This was the most prominent landmark in the Malverns. Where the Celts were said to have held out against the Romans. The misty sun was hovering over it like a white-cowled lamp.

The name Malvern came from the Welsh moel bryn, meaning bald hill, and bald it still was, up on the tops of this startling volcanic ridge, while the foothills and the Alpine-looking valleys were lush with orchards and the gardens of summer villas: well-preserved remains of Elgar’s England.

‘Three … four now,’ Spicer said. ‘Maybe even five, including this one. That’s inside a couple of months. One was a lorry, took a chunk out of the church wall.’

‘And on a stretch of road as open as this, I suppose that’s…’

‘Drivers reckoned they swerved to avoid a ghost,’ Spicer said.

His tone hadn’t altered and his eyes remained limpid. A wood pigeon’s hollow call was funnelled out of the valley.

‘That took a while to come out, didn’t it?’ Merrily said.

‘Come back to the house.’ He turned away. ‘We’ll talk about it there.’

After very little sleep, Jane awoke all sweating and confused. On one level she was lit up with excitement, on another fired by the wrongness of things: injustice, greed, sacrilege.

Bastards.

The thinness of the light showed that it was still early, but the Mondrian walls were already aglow: ancient timber-framed squares, once wattle and daub, then plastered and whitewashed and finally overpainted, by Jane herself, in defiant reds and blues and oranges.

It was more than two years since she’d coloured the squares – just a kid, then, disoriented by the move to this antiquated village with a mother who used to be normal and had suddenly turned into a bloody priest.

Just a kid, determined to make her mark: Jane’s here now. Jane takes no shit. This is Jane’s apartment. This is the way Jane does things, OK?

In a seventeenth-century vicarage, it wouldn’t have been at all OK with the Listed-Buildings Police, but it had seemed unlikely that they’d ever come beating on the door with a warrant to investigate the attic. Looking back, Mum had been seriously good about it, letting Jane establish a personal suite up here and splatter the walls with coloured paint they couldn’t really afford … and never once suggesting that it might look just a bit crap.

But that was over two years ago and now Jane was, Christ, seventeen. And this once-important gesture, these once-deeply-symbolic walls, were looking entirely, irredeemably naff. Not even much like a Mondrian – in the middle of an A-level art course, she could say that with some certainty.

More like a sodding nursery school.

Decision: the Mondrian walls would have to go. You were in no position to fight senseless public vandalism if you couldn’t identify your own small crimes.

That sorted, Jane sat up in bed and looked out of the window at the real issue. Full of the breathless excitement of new discovery and a low-burning rage which, she’d have to admit, was also a serious turn-on.

Below her, beyond the front hedge, lay Ledwardine, this black and white, oak-framed village, embellished with old gold by the early sun. Defended against neon and advertising hoardings by the same guys who would’ve freaked if they’d ever been exposed to the Mondrian walls … while totally missing the Big Picture.

The focus of which was just beyond the village: a green, wooded pyramid rising out of a flimsy loincloth of mist.

Cole Hill. She’d always assumed that it had simply been named after somebody called Cole who’d tried to farm it a few centuries ago. Now … Cole Hill … it sang with glamour.

Jane sank back into the pillows, last night’s images coalescing around her: the slipping sun and the line across the meadow. Drifting down from the hill, with the blackening steeple of Ledwardine Church marking the way like the gnomon on the sundial of the village. Amazing, inspirational.

But, like, for how long?

Tumbling out of bed, she dislodged from the table the paperback Old Straight Track she’d been reading until about two a.m. – photo on the back of benign-looking bearded old guy, glasses on his nose. Alfred Watkins of Hereford: county councillor, magistrate, businessman, antiquarian, photographer, inventor, all-round solid citizen. And visionary.

Jane Watkins picked up the book.

You and me, Uncle.

This book … well, it had been around the vicarage as long as Jane had, and she’d thought she must have read it ages ago. Only realizing a week or so back that all she’d done was leaf through it, looking at Watkins’s pioneering photos, assuming his ideas were long outdated, his findings revised by more enlightened thinking. Now, because of this A-level project, she’d finally read it cover to cover. Twice. Feeling the heat of a blazing inspiration. And it was all so close. Mum was probably right when she said there was no family link, and yet it was as if this long-dead guy with the same name was communicating with Jane along one of his own mysterious straight lines.

Saying, help me.

Jane turned her back on the clashing imperatives of the Mondrian walls, stumbled to the bathroom, and ran the shower.

She needed back-up on this one.

Two years ago, telling Mum would have been a total no-no, the issue too left-field and the gulf between them too wide. Two years ago, the sight of Mum kneeling to pray would have Jane shrivelling up inside with embarrassment and resentment. But now she was older and Mum was also more balanced, a lot less rigid.

Except for the rumble of the old Aga and the rhythmic sandpaper sound of Ethel washing her paws on the rug in front of it, the kitchen was silent.

Jane found a note on the table. It said:

J. YOU’VE PROBABLY FORGOTTEN ALL ABOUT THIS … BUT HAD TO LEAVE EARLY THIS MORNING TO MEET PARANOID RECTOR IN THE MALVERNS. THICK-SLICED LOAF IN BREAD BIN, EGGS IN BASKET. DON’T FORGET TO LEAVE DRIED FOOD OUT FOR ETHEL. SORRY ABOUT THIS, FLOWER. SEE YOU AFTER SCHOOL. LOVE, M.

Flower. Like she was seven.

But, yeah, she had forgotten. In fact, there’d been so much on her mind when she’d come in last night from Cole Hill that she’d hardly listened to anything Mum had said, before pleading fatigue and bounding up to the apartment to research, research, research well into the early hours, until she’d finally fallen asleep.

Jane left the note on the table, went to find the dried cat-food for Ethel and grab a handful of biscuits from the tin. No time for eggs and toast.

What about school?

What about not going?

She didn’t remember ever bunking off before. But some things were too important for delays, and anyway school was winding down now towards the long summer break.

Trying to open the biscuit tin, she found she was still gripping The Old Straight Track, having brought it down with her like a talisman. On the front was a misty photograph of a perfect Bronze Age burial mound swelling behind a fan of winter trees.

Yesterday evening, at sunset, she’d seen – and she must have been around there a dozen times in the past without spotting it – what must surely be the remains of a burial mound, or tumulus, or tump, on the edge of the orchard behind Church Street. The magical things you could so easily miss, bypass, ignore … or destroy.

Jane felt this swelling sense of responsibility towards a man who had already been dead for well over half a century when she was born.

You and me, Uncle Alfie.

Must have been in one of Jane’s pagan books that Merrily had read how, in primitive communities, the local shaman was often a social outcast, both feared and derided. Being a female exorcist in the Church of England gave you some idea of what this must have been like.

‘Deliverance Consultant.’ The Reverend Spicer was shaking his head wearily. ‘What exactly does that … you know … ?’

She’d watched him moving around, pulling down tea caddy, mugs, milk and sugar from strong, beechwood units. He knew where everything was. After what Sophie had told her in the office, she’d been half-expecting some kind of desperate chaos in the rectory kitchen – unwashed dishes, layers of congealed fat on the stove – but it was clean and functional, if not exactly cosy.

He spilled a single blob of milk, frowned and ran a dishcloth over it.

‘I know what “exorcist” used to mean. Deliverance is a bit more … And consultant?’

‘That just means I don’t get involved personally unless I’m invited to. On the basis that these … slightly iffy things are usually best handled by the guy on the ground. Which would be you, Mr Spicer.’

‘Call me Syd.’ He opened a cutlery drawer, extracted two spoons. ‘You ever done an exorcism?’

‘Minor exorcism, mainly – Requiem Eucharist for the unquiet dead, variations on that. Never had to stop a small child abusing herself with a crucifix, never been sprayed with green bile. Although, naturally, I live in hope.’

You got this all the time. A recent survey had shown that more people in Britain believed in ghosts than in God. Whereas parish priests still tended to believe in some kind of God but often had a problem with ghosts. Even more of a problem with exorcism, last refuge of anachronistic misfits in the desperately modern C of E.

Spicer didn’t smile. Behind him, on the Rayburn, the kettle hissed.

‘So what qualifies for a minor exorcism?’

‘Usually, an unhappy atmosphere that doesn’t respond to concentrated prayer. Would you like me to lend you a book? That’d take care of the consultant bit.’

‘I think I need the personal service.’ He sat down opposite her. ‘I’m just … not sure, frankly, about where you…’

Merrily sighed. That other familiar barbed hurdle.

‘My spiritual director is a bloke called Huw Owen. Runs deliverance training courses in the Brecon Beacons?’

‘Yeah, I know the area.’

His small, passive eyes said, too well. Curious.

‘At the end of the course he gave me the regulation warning. Told me ordained women were becoming the prime target for every psychotic grinder of the satanic mills who ever sacrificed a chicken. Therefore a woman exorcist might as well paint a big bull’s-eye between her … on her chest.’

‘Maybe you saw it as a bit of a challenge.’ Spicer, decently, didn’t look at Merrily’s chest. ‘A chance to carry women’s ministry into a dark and forbidden area.’

‘Well, no, the point I’m making … I’m not a militant feminist, I’m not a post-feminist, I’m not pioneer material and I’m not—’

‘Honestly.’ He held up his hands. ‘I don’t have a problem with women priests. Nor even women deliverance consultants. In principle.’

‘So the problem is?’

The kettle came whistling to the boil.

‘Problem is,’ he said, ‘taking it seriously, as you’re bound to do – being comparatively new to the job and with the side issue of the women’s ministry still having something to prove – it occurs to me you might not be up for what could be a PR exercise.’

‘You’ve lost me.’

‘I mean if I, as Rector of Wychehill, were to ask you, as official diocesan exorcist, to perform a public ceremony of, shall we say, spiritual cleansing, whatever you wanna call it, simply to make the community feel happier – take some pressure off?’

‘Off whom?’ Merrily reached down to her shoulder bag: cigarettes.

‘Off me, for a start.’ Spicer poured boiling water into a deep brown teapot. ‘See, these people who say they had an accident because they swerved to avoid a spectral figure on the Queen’s Highway … I’m having difficulty with it. They’re decent people, but…’

‘That’s OK.’ Merrily brought out the Silk Cut and the dented Zippo. ‘Really.’

To a stranger, the road was the least ghostly aspect of Upper Wychehill. It glided down the valley in a long, slow slope, with the wooded hills hunched behind it like a giant’s shoulders. As many of its dwellings were invisible, it had been hard to make out where the village began and where it ended.

The reason why many of the homes were invisible was that they were on different levels, with rows of houses above and below the road. The ones above were set back into the hill and the ones falling away below it, all you could see of them as you drove past were hedges, walls and gates. They seemed to be mainly bungalows with colonial verandas or flagged patios with sundials and statuary, barbecues and big views across Herefordshire.

The few grey buildings at road level were weighted by the church, this immense neo-Gothic barn, probably late-Victorian, screened by two substantial oak trees either side of the entrance. Further down, built of the same stone, with a dramatic view of the Beacon, was the rectory. A big family house with a home-made swing in the front garden. From what Merrily understood from Sophie, the Spicer kids had been long past the swing stage. But it still looked starkly symbolic of loss, with its peeling frame and one side of the wooden seat fallen off its chain.

When they were inside, she’d asked Spicer, without thinking, if he had help in the house.

‘What? A cleaner? A housekeeper?’ He’d laughed. ‘Do you?’

Point taken. No private income.

‘I get occasional offers,’ he’d said. ‘We’ve got several nice ladies in Upper Wychehill. The Ladies of Wychehill? That sound like a book? Listen. First rule for the solo priest. Don’t give anybody room for gossip. My wife left just over three months ago. Since then, I’ve done all my own cleaning, cooking, gardening, painting, the lot, plus keeping three parishes on the go. Which makes for a long day.’

He’d looked at her, his soft-toy’s eyes unmoving.

‘But a mercifully short night.’

Outside the bay window, the still-shadowed long back lawn was tidily mown and trimmed but had no flowers. It ended where a bank of fir trees lifted the land into the hills.

‘I can give you a list of people to talk to, so you can make up your own mind.’ Syd Spicer crossed to the Rayburn. ‘You want some toast? Or I can do full English. I’m fairly capable.’

‘I can see that. Tea’ll be fine, thanks.’

He brought two white mugs to the table, and then sugar and milk.

‘Point is, Mrs Watkins, country areas—’

‘Merrily, do you think?’

‘Yeah, OK. Country areas, Merrily, are superstitious, just like they’ve always been – you know this. Where are you based, North Herefordshire?’

‘Ledwardine. ’Bout an hour from here.’

He nodded. ‘Only nowadays the superstition comes from a different direction. The locals might be less credulous than their grandparents were, but your city-bred incomers always include the kind of people who’re living in the sticks because they want to get back to a primitive belief system. They’re the ones who organize the wassailing and stuff at Christmas, dangle charms off their porches.’

‘Everything except go to church,’ Merrily said. ‘But if you have an accident black spot, they’ll be the first to suggest the area might be haunted?’

Spicer shook his head sadly.

‘I’ve got three parishes and the others are a healthy mix of locals and new blood. In Upper Wychehill, a real local person is somebody who’s been here twenty-five years. It didn’t really exist until the 1920s, when the church was built – gesture of apology by the owner of one of the quarry firms mutilating the Malverns.’

‘He must have been very sorry.’

‘Yeah, big, innit? Especially in the middle of a few farms and not much else, as it was then. The bloke saw it as a concert hall as well, however – strictly religious, of course. Same time, he had this house built for the minister, and a sum of money donated to the Church, to pay him – long exhausted, of course but, by then, more housing had gone up and it was a legit parish.’

‘So, what you’re saying, it’s not—’

‘Not a real village, no. Just a mess of mixed-up dwellings either side of a road with no pavement. So people never walk about and they rarely meet each other. Some are weekend cottages. Bloke died in one last year, wasn’t found for three weeks. That’s the way it is. No village shop, no cosy pub. Just a church that was always too big and people who move here for the views.’

Spicer had taken a folded piece of notepaper out of his cassock. He opened it out and placed it on the table in front of Merrily.

Dear Rector,

I am sorry to bother you, and I never thought I would write a letter like this, but I am worried sick about my daughter who as you know is a district nurse and has to go out at all hours in her car. I am terrified that something will happen to her on that road. These stories are hard to credit, but something is wrong here. I do not get to church as often as I would like since I have become disabled but I beg of you to take whatever measures are necessary to deal with this problem. I do not care who or what it is, it must be got rid of by whatever means are open to you.

I feel foolish writing a letter like this but Helen is all I have left in this world.

Yours sincerely,

D. H. Walford

‘Poor old Donald. His wife died three years ago. Daughter got divorced and moved in with him. He’s an entirely rational man, retired primary school head. But this … this is how it escalates.’

‘What was the first reported accident?’

‘Lorry. Came across the road, into the church wall, like I said. Still waiting for the insurance to get sorted.’

‘Did you talk to the driver?’

‘I was out at the time, but the guy told Mrs Aird, who does the flowers in the church. She was in there when it happened. He said he’d seen this white orb coming towards him down the middle of the road.’

‘So this was at night?’

‘Early morning. Police suggested the bloke had been driving too long. We tidied up the wall, thought no more about it.’

‘Until…’

‘Week or so later, Tim Loste, the choirmaster, hit a telegraph pole. Not injured, fortunately. And then there was a woman, lives up the hill, flattened her sports car on a tourist’s Winnebago.’

‘And they both saw this light?’

‘They both … saw a figure behind the light.’

He turned to the window. The summer sun had finally penetrated his flowerless garden, but it still looked as if it was clinging to winter. Syd Spicer too, Merrily thought, as he turned to face her.

‘And there might be another one, which is … a bit weird. Joyce Aird can tell you. They won’t talk to me about it. Joyce was waiting for me after the worship yesterday. We’d had some prayers for the victims of the night before, and Joyce said … She gave me a piece of paper with your phone number on it, which she’d obtained from the Diocese. Said it was time to seek help to remove the evil from our midst.’

‘So, essentially, you had me forced on you,’ Merrily said.

‘Me, I’ve been telling them, let’s get the council in … surveyors … examine the road camber. Let’s not get carried away. Famous last words.’

‘What about the Land Rover driver, the chairman of the parish council. Did he see—?’

‘I haven’t even asked him, Merrily.’

She sighed. ‘Would you mind if I had a cigarette?’

Spicer put his head on one side.

‘You disapprove?’

He shrugged. ‘I have one occasionally. When I want to. You go ahead, if you need one.’

‘Doesn’t matter.’ Merrily dropped the Silk Cut back into her shoulder bag. ‘You said there was something a bit weird.’

‘Oh, well, that … Joyce wouldn’t talk about it. Not to me. Said it was best discussed with a woman. I suppose I’m getting a bit…’

‘I can imagine.’ She lowered her bag to the floor. ‘How do you want me to go about this?’

‘Well, that’s up to you, Merrily. But the way some of them are reacting, I’m not sure that a simple blessing of the road would be quite enough. I suppose I’d like you to talk to them.’

‘Well, obviously I’d have to—’

‘No, I mean all of them.’

‘All of them?’

‘Everybody,’ Syd Spicer said.

‘All of them?’ Sophie said in the Cathedral gatehouse office. ‘Are you sure you know what you’re doing? At a public meeting?’

Merrily sighed.

‘It’s a very public ghost.’

‘Merrily…’ Sophie looked pained. ‘Has there ever been such a thing as a public ghost?’

Merrily thought about this, elbows on the desk, chin cupped in her palms. She’d been thinking about it for many of the fifty gridlocked minutes she’d spent watching guys in cranes playing pass-the-girder on the site of another new superstore that Hereford didn’t need.

‘No,’ she said. ‘In the real sense, I suppose not.’

‘There you are, then,’ Sophie said. ‘Let the Rector have his public meeting and then you go along afterwards – quietly – and do what you think is necessary.’

Sophie Hill, crisp white blouse and pearls. Very posh, discreet as a ballot box. The Bishop’s lay secretary who, essentially, didn’t work for people or organizations. Who worked for The Cathedral.

Except on Mondays, when Sophie worked more or less full-time for Deliverance. For most parish priests, Monday was a well-defended day off; for Merrily, only a day off from the parish. Monday was when she and Sophie met in the gatehouse office at the Cathedral to deal with the mail and the Deliverance database, and to monitor outstanding cases.

‘I need to remind you that the Crown Prosecution Service have warned that you may still be called to give evidence in the Underhowle case when it finally comes to trial. And on that issue – aftercare. The new minister there would welcome some discreet advice on, as he puts it, disinfecting the former Baptist chapel.’

‘In which case, I might need to go over. Could we stall him until next week? If he could just keep it locked, meantime … keep people out.’

‘Next week also, you’ve agreed to talk to that rather persistent Women’s Institute in the Golden Valley … unfair to postpone again. Don’t look like that – you agreed.’

‘OK.’

Problem here was that WIs always wanted lurid anecdotes, and this was a small county population-wise: one of the audience would always be able to fit names into whichever sensitive issue you were discussing. The policy was to avoid WIs, but occasionally one squeezed through the net. And, sure, there was a pile of parish stuff accumulating on the diary, including a christening tomorrow, and two weddings looming. Big months for weddings, June and July. So…

‘What you’re telling me, Sophie, is that I really don?