Friends of the Dusk

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Lots I haven’t told you.’

  ‘Something else that might affect… the future?’

  ‘There is a future in it. Though it’s all hand-to-mouth, even according to Coops. Not that I mind that. I never really want, you know, security and all that crap.’

  Merrily nodded. What could you say? Nobody wanted security at Jane’s age. At Jane’s age, she’d been listening to vintage goth rock and wearing black lipstick. No, actually that was when she’d been a few years younger than Jane. At Jane’s age she’d been about to get herself…

  She stopped to let another tractor haul its trailer into a field.

  ‘I’m not pregnant,’ Jane said.

  ‘I didn’t—’

  ‘You were working up to it. I keep telling you, I’m never going to get bloody pregnant. We’re choking the planet.’

  ‘Right,’ Merrily said.

  You got this increasingly from Jane who was even cooling on her beloved paganism because so much of it was based on rituals to promote the kind of fertility we didn’t need any more.

  She was peering out at a tilting signpost.

  ‘What’s the name of this place you’re looking for?’

  ‘Cwmarrow.’

  ‘Valley of the Arrow? Are you sure it’s round here? Because, obviously, the River Arrow—’

  ‘Is miles away, yes.’

  She’d wondered about this herself. The River Arrow was one of their own rivers, to the north. It didn’t come anywhere near this far down.

  ‘And this is from Raji Khan, right?’ Jane said.

  Merrily leaned back, loosened her grip on the wheel. Adults. Communicate like adults.

  ‘A long-time friend of Khan’s – so close he likes to call him his cousin – lives at Cwmarrow in a house he believes is badly haunted. The guy, like Khan, is a Muslim, but imams don’t mess with infidel ghosts. So they’ve come to me. That’s it.’

  ‘Wow. Cutting edge, or what?’

  ‘And, because I don’t want to go there tomorrow entirely unprepared, I’d like to see where the house is, before it goes dark. How old, et cetera. Essentially, I don’t want to be surprised by something I ought to have known.’

  ‘A recce?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘And, erm…’ Jane’s arms had unfolded. ‘What’s happening there?’

  ‘I don’t really know. Khan was being reticent. I mean, all this work needs to be fairly discreet, but this, for various reasons, is more so. So, no I was not to tell the new Bishop of Hereford. And you know what, flower? Suddenly I’m quite glad.’

  Glancing sideways, she saw eyebrows going up.

  Adults.

  Sod it. She told Jane about this afternoon and felt better.

  Turning left into the village of Vowchurch, they passed a little church with a squat-spired timbered tower, and then, in the adjacent hamlet of Turnastone, another church. She remembered an old story explaining why these two had been built so close together: two sisters, rivals, one saying, I vow to build my church first, and the second one sniffing. I’ll have mine built before you can turn a stone of yours. Something like that. In this area it was hard to find a church without a foundation myth.

  They also passed a shop with ancient petrol pumps outside, the kind that needed someone to work them for you. Sloping fields, sheep, the carcass of a pickup truck with bricks instead of back wheels, all below a lowering sun, light bleeding between fleshy clouds.

  ‘Obviously, I’ve no right to expect him to pay me any more attention than any parish priest. It was just that Sophie had told me he’d done a deliverance course, so I thought maybe… you know, I was asked to be there when he called in at the office. Which he said, by the way, that he loved because he could look out of the window and see his flock milling around on Broad Street. He’s sitting in my chair, I’m perched on the side of a table near the other window, nodding and smiling, the way you do, and waiting for him to talk about… something he wasn’t going to talk about.’

  He laughed a lot, the Bishop. He went haw, haw. He actually did that. But it was raucous, something thrown out. Not a laugh you shared.

  ‘He said he must visit Ledwardine one day. And then he said he had some letters for Sophie to do, and he opened his briefcase, and began to dictate. I thought maybe it was something urgent and he’d stop after one letter, but it was just an acceptance of an invitation to lunch with the chairman and cabinet members of Herefordshire Council. And then he started another and… that was it. I realized I was expected to leave.’

  ‘But he’d arranged a meeting with you.’ Jane sitting up, straining her seat belt. ‘That was what you said.’

  ‘Evidently I was wrong. According to Sophie, he’d said he was coming to see her office, and she assumed he knew it was also the deliverance office, and she’d asked him if he wanted to see me, and he appeared to nod. But… he was coming to see his lay secretary. In her office.’

  When she’d left the gatehouse, Innes had been sitting at her desk, his back to the window, dictating a letter to Sophie. Not interrupting his thread to say goodbye, not really looking at her. Just raising a hand while consulting the notes on his iPad.

  ‘So when is he coming to see you? Don’t sound like you don’t care. I saw your face when you came out.’

  ‘Maybe I was remembering something. Like, when he said he must visit Ledwardine, as if he’d never been… well, he had. I’d been trying to think where I’d seen him, and it was in Ledwardine. On a bank holiday. August? With his wife and two or three kids, on the square. I noticed him because he was wearing some kind of Hawaiian shirt. And looking across at the vicarage. Which is not that unusual. People do, it’s a nice old house. Jane, I’m a bit lost. I thought I was still following Khan’s directions, but…’

  The way forward was far from obvious. And the road was getting narrower and the day was dimming. Farms and cottages you could only half see behind trees and swellings in the land, the Black Mountains so close you couldn’t see them at all.

  ‘We could ask somebody,’ Jane said. ‘If there was anybody to ask.’

  She glared out at the sunken lane, its unruly hedges. Merrily slowed. The dipped headlights had found a ridge of hard grass growing down the middle of the lane like a Mohawk haircut. Usually an indication that this would end in a farmyard.

  ‘Actually, I really like it round here,’ Jane said. ‘Lots of archaeology. Most of it hidden. Overgrown castle mounds and tumps. And hill forts. No official history – like no National Trust stuff, but it’s all around you, unlabelled. You need to know what you’re looking for. I like that.’

  It was growing dark so quickly that you could almost watch it happening, like speeded-up video with the soundtrack dropping away. Merrily’s window was down. No birds, no wind. Only the sun’s last watery discharge between the clouds.

  Then lights ahead. Jane turned to look behind them.

  ‘Didn’t that sign say Cwmarrow?’

  ‘Think so.’

  The lane widened into a clearing; at the end of it the headlights found a gated field and then close-packed, mixed woodland to either side. Dead end, apart from a track curving uphill towards a sprawling farmhouse with lights in downstairs rooms, and the lump of a hill behind.

  ‘What’s that?’ Jane was sitting up. ‘What is that?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘There!’

  The hill was clearer now, and also what was jutting from a wooded ridge like a smashed tooth.

  Merrily said, ‘Castle? Bits of.’

  ‘You didn’t say there was a castle.’

  ‘I didn’t know. Khan… ah, he said there was “a significant outbuilding”.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of a castle, anywhere near here. I mean, there are castle mounds, maybe one or two stones, but that…’

  ‘There’s not much left.’

  ‘There is, Mum. That’s a serious ruin. Why don’t I know about it? Is it a nineteenth-century folly or something?’

  ‘In this ar
ea? Wouldn’t think so.’

  The road was deeply rutted, the car bouncing. In the dancing headlights two wooden gateposts came up, and one carried a sign: Cwmarrow Court.

  ‘Go on.’ Jane was feeling for the door handle. ‘Drive up.’

  ‘No way.’ Merrily swung the wheel. ‘I just wanted to see it, that’s all.’

  ‘If it’s a castle, there must be a footpath, at least. Bloody hell, Mum…’

  ‘Too dark. You could break a leg up there. But it’s not exactly a disappointment, is it?’

  ‘It’s an enchanted landscape. You know what I mean?’

  It was good to see the kid’s mood change so rapidly. Good to know the diminishing world could still excite her. Merrily smiled in the gloom of the cab.

  ‘Before you left for Pembrokeshire, it was like all that was behind you. Then, when we were talking on the phone once, you said you’d been surprised to find you weren’t the only one turned on by the mysterious.’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘You were rabbiting on about it all again, for the first time in ages, getting excited. Alignments of ancient sites, the importance of myths and legends. As if you were, I dunno, suddenly amongst friends?’

  ‘I may have got that wrong,’ Jane said quietly. ‘Maybe I was just being… humoured.’

  Spell broken. Merrily reversed to the field gate at the end of the clearing. In the rear-view mirror, the sky had scabbed over.

  13

  Big voice

  SOMETIMES SOPHIE WOULD sound annoyed or affronted, seldom anything more intense. Her emotions lived on a short leash. Which tonight, on the phone from home, was evidently fraying.

  ‘He asked to see the deliverance files. He wanted to know what you’d been working on.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘About half an hour after you’d left.’

  ‘Why didn’t he ask me?’

  Merrily nodded thanks to Jane for a mug of tea. Jane left. The desk lamp in the scullery lit a folded 1:25,000 Ordnance Survey map. At its centre, inside a circle, the word castle in gothic script.

  ‘Merrily, I don’t know what’s happening,’ Sophie said, sounding almost querulous, sounding her age. ‘I wish I did.’

  ‘What did you tell him? About what I was working on. If you don’t mind me asking?’

  ‘That you were keeping an eye on the New House on Aylestone Hill, staying in regular touch with people there. Aftercare. And also acting in an advisory capacity with local ministers on two bereavement issues. Why would you think I might mind?’

  ‘I suppose because you’re the Bishop’s lay secretary, and your primary allegiance should be to him. I’m just a…’

  ‘Just someone I’ve known for several years and grown to care about.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  Silence. Sophie had rung twice while they were in the Golden Valley, leaving messages on the machine. This was not sounding good. Merrily kept trying to picture the new Bishop and couldn’t. He was just somebody big and bland and purple.

  ‘He was looking back over the past couple of years. On the computer and in the filing cabinet. He went through the related press cuttings. He went through the contacts list. He’d occasionally ask a question.’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘Like how often did you work with the police? Were you consulted by them or was it sometimes the other way round? Seemed he’d had lunch recently with the chief constable accompanied by DCI Howe. In the way that new bishops do. I pointed out that his predecessor thought that careful interaction with police and some social services was a positive thing. Knowing that Bishop Craig is keen on the Church being relevant.’

  ‘What did he say to that?’

  ‘He asked how many parishes you had. I said just the one. But covering quite a large area. He expressed surprise. I pointed out how the deliverance role had expanded significantly since you took over from Canon Dobbs. And that his predecessor, recognizing this, had tried to avoid overloading you in other areas. He… said nothing.’

  ‘Well…’

  ‘I tried to explain that you rarely managed a day off and hadn’t had a holiday since you started. He didn’t comment on that either. And then… then he went on to ask about someone he said he found in the contacts file. Anthea White.’

  ‘She’s not in the contacts file.’

  ‘I didn’t think she was either.’

  ‘He asked if she was a personal friend of yours. I said she was not.’

  ‘Dear God.’ Merrily took a hit from the e-cig. ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘I thought I should explain something about Miss White. I told him she was a former senior civil servant with considerable knowledge of… I used the phrase ‘spiritual byways’. He said, do you mean occultism? It was immediately clear to me that he already knew who and what Anthea White was.’

  ‘He actually asked you that?’

  ‘Not directly. I said that the explosion in religious activity of a kind that was once illegal meant you felt you had to keep abreast of what was happening. He laughed.’

  Haw haw.

  ‘I took the opportunity to tell him again how hard you’d had to work in quite a short time, and how – possibly because you were the first woman to undertake the deliverance role – you’d been approached far more often than your predecessor, Canon Dobbs. In retrospect, I regret saying that. He said you looked tired.’

  ‘I do?’

  ‘He—’ Sophie’s voice had grown parched; she cleared her throat. ‘He asked me if I thought it might be a good idea for you to be relieved, as he put it, of some of your burden.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Like… putting extra people into deliverance?’

  This had happened before. A deliverance panel. Some of it still remained, but nothing formal. There were people she could call on. Not all of them inside the Church.

  ‘I don’t think that was what he meant,’ Sophie said.

  Huw’s phone wasn’t answered. There was no machine functioning, only the BT message telling you the unnamed person was not available.

  She sat under the Anglepoise, the only light in the room, and tried to concentrate on the map. It was one of Jane’s old ones. Ley lines had been drawn in. Jane’s once-beloved leys. She’d encircled the word

  castle

  Probably thinking it was just a mound. The word Cwmarrow wasn’t on the map, which was slightly odd because there were a couple more houses, a stream or river and something with dots around it, identified only as

  earthworks

  She kept staring at the map as if it might tell her something – which occasionally they did, with their dots and symbols and arcane lettering – and because she wanted to concentrate on something that didn’t involve an emotional response. All the map told her was why an imam might feel inappropriate. This was olde England, verging on olde Wales.

  As soon as they got in, Jane had found Cwmarrow Castle on the Net. Believed to have been built in the reign of King Stephen – late eleventh century? Stone keep and bailey walls. It had been held by the de Chandos family, major landowners in the area and then passed into the hands of the Louduns, whoever they were. By the fifteenth century it was already half-ruined. Now it wasn’t even on a right of way and…

  had lunch with the chief constable accompanied by DCI Howe.

  Merrily closed her eyes on the map. What had Howe told Innes? A year ago, that would have explained a lot. Annie Howe hadn’t liked her, she hadn’t liked Annie Howe. Now, while they weren’t exactly mates, an understanding, of sorts, had been reached.

  Hadn’t it?

  When she opened her eyes, the map was blurred. And the phone was ringing.

  ‘You didn’t tell me you’d had him on a course.’

  Trying to keep her voice steady.

  ‘Thought he might tell you himself,’ Huw said. ‘I were interested to hear what he might have to say about it.’

  ‘Sophie told me. The Bishop didn’t mention it. Or anything, much.’

  ‘And
what else did Sophie tell you? That he had a big pulpit voice?’

  ‘No, she didn’t say that.’

  ‘Preacher from an early age. Too early. He could make people listen. In Wales that’s always counted, a big voice. Open your mouth, shit comes out, but it comes out loud. Except he’s English and his old man were a Scot. Anyroad, he still got taken under the wing of a local minister who became a canon at Brecon. The legend is that Innes came to believe God had chosen him.’

  ‘And you think?’

  ‘I think God sometimes likes to take the piss.’

  ‘Huw, I…’

  Her voice fell away. She was seeing Craig Innes before he was Bishop, the vision clear as day. Ledwardine Square. Innes with a blonde woman, presumably his wife, and some kids. All brandishing ice-cream cornets in the sunshine. His shirt not quite Hawaiian but certainly loud, his face far more distinct in this particular memory than it had been this afternoon in the gatehouse office.

  ‘Craig Innes, the Deliverance Years,’ Huw said. ‘Except it weren’t years. Months, more like. He didn’t say owt about it?’

  ‘The subject didn’t arise, and I didn’t think I knew him well enough to bring it up.’

  ‘When he were on the course, he said virtually nowt, either. I’m thinking, you even listening, lad? He went through the motions.’

  ‘Box-ticking? Been there, done that?’

  Craig Innes smiling over his ice cream. On the square at Ledwardine last summer. Looking across at the vicarage.

  Merrily looked up at a familiar sound from outside the window: tock, tock, tock. The old, old briar she’d never liked to cut tapping thoughtfully at the glass.

  ‘All right, I’ll tell you,’ Huw said. ‘I’ll tell you about Craigie’s finest moment as a deliverance minister. Don’t put t’lights out.’

  14

  Bridgework

  THERE WERE CERTAIN things Bliss had never asked. No need. This element of the unspoken-about between Annie and him, sometimes he’d even felt it was essential to their survival as an item.

  But it was different now.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve ever asked you this before,’ Bliss said. ‘But do you actually still like him?’