‘Well, I have to tell you, you don’t have much time.’
‘But do I have the incentive, Tania? That’s the point.’
‘I wondered if there’d be a point.’
‘To be blunt,’ Jane said, ‘I need a very, very small favour.’
Home burial. It was becoming, if not exactly commonplace, then less of an upper-class phenomenon than it used to be. Merrily tried to explain this to Barbara Buckingham: that it was a secular thing, or sometimes a green issue; that you often didn’t even need official permission.
‘The main drawback for most people is the risk of taking value off their house if and when it’s sold. No one wants a grave in the garden.’
‘He’s not...’ Barbara had picked up her scarf again; she began to wind it around her hands. ‘He is not going to bury Menna; that’s the worst of it. She’s going into a... tomb.’ She pulled the scarf tight. ‘A mausoleum.’
‘Oh.’ To be loved like that.
‘He has a Victorian house at Old Hindwell,’ Barbara said. ‘The former rectory. Do you know Old Hindwell?’
‘Not really. Is it in this diocese, I can’t remember?’
‘Possibly. It’s very close to the border, about three miles from Kington, on the edge of the Forest. Radnor Forest. Weal’s house isn’t remote, but it has no immediate neighbours. In the garden there’s a... structure – wine store, ice house, air-raid shelter, I don’t know precisely what it is, but that’s where she’s going to be.’
‘Like a family vault?’
‘It’s sick. I went to see a solicitor in Hereford this morning. He told me there was nothing I could do. A man has a perfect legal right to keep his dead wife in a private museum.’
‘And as a solicitor himself, your brother-in-law is going to be fully aware of his rights.’
‘Don’t call him that!’ Barbara turned away. ‘Whole thing’s obscene.’
‘He loved her,’ Merrily said uncertainly. ‘He doesn’t want to be parted from her. He wants to feel that she’s near him. That’s the usual reason.’
‘No! It’s a statement of ownership. Possession is – what is it? – nine points of the law?’
‘That word again. Do you mind if I smoke?’
‘Go ahead.’
Merrily lit a Silk Cut, pulled over an ashtray.
‘What about the funeral itself? Is it strictly private? I mean, are you kind of barred?’
‘My dear!’ Barbara dropped the scarf. ‘It’s going to be a highly public affair. A service in the village hall.’
‘Not the church?’
‘They don’t have a church any more. The minister holds his services in the village hall.’
‘Ah. And the minister is...?’
‘Father Ellis.’
‘Nick Ellis.’ Merrily nodded. This explained a lot.
‘I don’t know why so many Anglicans are choosing to call themselves “Father” now, as if they’re courting Catholicism. You know this man?’
‘I know of him. He’s a charismatic minister, which means—’
‘Not happy-clappy?’ Barbara’s eyes narrowed in distaste. ‘Everybody hugging one another?’
‘That’s one aspect of it. Nick Ellis is also a member of a group known as the Sea of Light. It’s a movement inside the Anglican Church, which maintains that the Church has become too obsessed with property. Keepers of buildings rather than souls. They claim the Holy Spirit flows through people, not stones. So a Sea of Light minister is more than happy to hold services in village halls, community centres – and private homes, of course.’
‘And the same goes for burial.’
‘I would guess so.’
‘So Jeffery has an accomplice in the clergy.’ Barbara Buckingham stood up. ‘He would have, wouldn’t he? It’s such a tight little world.’
‘Look,’ Merrily said, ‘I know how you feel, but I really don’t think there’s anything you can do about it. And if Nick Ellis is conducting a funeral service at the village hall and a ceremony in J.W. Weal’s back garden, I’m not sure I can hold another one in a church. However—’
‘Mrs Watkins... Merrily...’ She’d failed with the solicitor, now she was trying the Church.
Merrily said awkwardly, ‘I’m really not sure this is a spiritual problem.’
‘Oh, but it is.’ Barbara splayed her fingers on the table, leaned towards Merrily. ‘She comes to me, you see...’
The bereavement ghost: the visitor. Maybe sitting in a familiar chair or walking in the garden, or commonly – like Menna – in dreams. Barbara Buckingham, staying at a hotel near Kington, had dreamt of her sister every night since her death.
Menna was wearing a white shift or shroud, with darkness around her.
‘You’d prefer, no doubt, to think the whole thing is a projection of my guilt,’ Barbara said.
‘Perhaps of your loss, even though you didn’t know her. Perhaps an even greater loss, because of all those years you might have known her, and now you realize you never will. Is your husband...?’
‘In France on a buying trip. He has an antiques business.’
‘How do you feel when you wake up?’
‘Anxious.’ Barbara drank some tea very quickly. ‘And drained. Exhausted and debilitated.’
‘Have you seen a doctor?’
‘Yes. As it happens’ – a mild snort – ‘I’ve seen Menna’s doctor, Collard Banks-Morgan. We were at the same primary school. “Dr Coll”, they all call him now. But if you were suggesting that a little Valium might help to relax me, I didn’t go to consult him about myself.’
‘You wanted to know why she’d suffered a stroke.’
‘I gatecrashed his surgery at the school in Old Hindwell. Made a nuisance of myself, not that it made any difference. Bloody man told me I was asking him to be unethical, preempting the post-mortem. He was like that as a child, terribly proper. If they’d had a head boy at the primary school, it would’ve been Collard Banks-Morgan.’
‘Did you find out if there was a long-term blood pressure problem?’
‘No.’ Barbara Buckingham put on her scarf at last. ‘But I will.’
‘Look,’ Merrily said, ‘why don’t we say a prayer for Menna before you go? For her spirit. Why don’t we pop over to the church?’
‘I’ve taken too much of your time.’
‘I think it might help.’ Fifth rule of Deliverance: whether you believe the story or not, never leave things without at least a prayer. ‘I would like to help, if I can.’
And there was more to this. Merrily was curious now. Everything suggested there was more. Why should this woman feel robbed of a sister she’d never really known?
‘Then come to the funeral,’ Barbara said.
‘Me?’
‘Is that too much of an imposition?’
‘Well, no but—’
‘You were at the hospital with her.’
Merrily agonized then about whether she should tell Barbara Buckingham what she’d witnessed in the side ward. It was clear Cullen hadn’t or Barbara would have mentioned that. She remembered the feeling she’d had then of something ritualistic about the way Weal was putting dabs of water on Menna’s corpse and then himself. Refusing to let the nurses try to feed her. Refusing to let Merrily pray for her. Wanting to do everything himself. It was, she supposed, a kind of possession.
But she decided to say nothing. It might only inflame an already fraught situation.
‘OK. I’ll try to come. What day?’
‘Saturday. Three-thirty. Old Hindwell village hall.’
‘That should be OK. If something comes up, where can I get a message to you?’