‘One forgets,’ Sophie mused, ‘that rural funerals are such social events.’
The lanes seemed to have brought them in a loop, back into conifer country. The official Old Hindwell sign was small and muddied. Just beyond it, set back into a clearing, sat a well-built, stone Victorian house with a small, conical turret at one end. In most of its windows, curtains were drawn; the others probably didn’t have curtains.
‘The old rectory, do you think?’ Sophie said.
‘Weal’s house? You could be right. There’s obviously nobody about. If it is the rectory, we ought to be able to see the old church nearby.’
She peered among the trees, an uneasy mixture of leafless, twisted oaks and dark, thrusting firs.
‘I suppose it must have occurred to you,’ Sophie said, ‘that the old church here might have been the one referred to by that woman on your TV programme.’
‘The pagan church, mmm?’ The road took them through a farm layout – windowless buildings on either side. ‘But let’s not worry about that until someone asks us to.’
The first grey-brown cottages appeared up ahead.
And the cars. The village was clogged with cars.
The pub car park was full, as was the yard in front of what had once been a school. Cars and Land Rovers also lined the two principal lanes, blocking driveways and entrances, until the roads became so narrow that another parked vehicle would have made them impassable. Could it possibly be like this every Sunday?
Sophie slowed for a drab posse of mourners. They crossed the road and filed into a tarmac track between two big leylandii.
‘The village hall,’ Merrily said, unnecessarily.
It stood on what she judged to be the western edge of the village, partly concealed a little way up a conifered hillside, and was accessed by a footpath and steps. Sophie wondered aloud how they got any wheelchairs up there, for all the disabled people who thought Nicholas Ellis’s prayers might cure them.
‘So it’s true then?’ Merrily said. ‘He does healing, too?’
‘I copied cuttings from the local papers onto your computer file.’ Sophie reversed into a field entrance to turn round again in the hope of finding a space. ‘I don’t suppose you had time to read them yet. I don’t know how many people he’s actually supposed to have healed.’
‘You don’t usually get statistics on it.’
Sophie frowned. ‘That sort of thing is just not Anglican, somehow.’
‘No? What about the shrine of St Thomas, in the cathedral?’
‘Not the same thing.’
‘What – because Ellis spent some time in the States?’
‘My information is that he learned his trade with the more extreme kind of Bible Belt evangelist.’ Sophie shuddered. ‘Would you like to borrow my coat? It may not be exactly funereal, but it’s at least...’
‘Respectable?’
‘I’m sorry,’ Sophie said. ‘I didn’t mean—’
‘Of course you didn’t.’ When Merrily smiled her face felt so stiff with fatigue that it hurt. ‘If anyone does notice me, I could pretend to be a poor single-parent whom Mr Weal defended on a shoplifting charge.’
When the strangers came in, Gomer was getting the local take on the planting of Menna Weal in the rectory garden.
‘Most people couldn’t equate it wiv him being a lawyer and into property,’ Greg said. ‘Who’s gonna wanna buy a house wiv a bleedin’ great tomb? They say he’ll leave it to his nephew who’s started in the firm, but would you wanna live in a house wiv your dead auntie in the garden?’
Gomer wondered how he’d feel if his Min was buried in the back garden, and decided it wouldn’t be right for either of them. In the churchyard she wasn’t alone, see. Not meaning the dead; it was the coming and going of the living.
‘But what I reckon...’ Greg said. ‘That building’s right down the bottom of the garden, OK? You could lop it off, make it separate. A little park, with a footpath to it. The Weal memorial garden. I reckon that’s what he’s got in mind.’
‘Nobody ask him?’
‘Blimey, you don’t ask him nothing. Not even the time – you’d get a bleedin’ bill. It’s like there’s a wall around him, wiv an admission charge. And no first names. It’s Mr Weal. Or J.W., if you’re a friend.’
‘He got many friends?’
‘He knows a lot of people. That’s the main fing in his profession.’ Greg turned to his two new customers. ‘Yes, gents...’
They wore suits – but not funeral suits. Both youngish fellows, in their thirties. One was a bit paunchy, with a half-grown beard; he ordered two pints.
‘Not here for the funeral?’ Greg said.
‘Ah, that’s what it is.’ The plump, bearded one paid for their drinks. ‘Must be somebody important, all those cars.’
‘Oh, that’s not unusual. There’s a mass of cars every Sunday. Popular man, our minister. You get people coming from fifty miles away.’
Gomer looked up, gobsmacked. Most of these folks were not here for Menna at all, but part of some travelling fan club for the rector? Bloody hell.
‘Hang on,’ the plump feller with the beard said. ‘Are there two churches, then?’
‘Kind of,’ Greg said. ‘Our minister uses the village hall for his services.’
‘But the old one, the old church – that’s disused, right?’
‘Long time ago. It’s a ruin.’
‘Can you still get to it?’
‘You probably can,’ Greg said, ‘but it’s on private land. It’s privately owned now.’
‘Only my mate wanted to take some pictures. With permission, of course. We don’t want to go sneaking about. Who would we ask? Who owns it?’
‘Well, it’s new people, actually – only been moved in a week or so. There’s a farmhouse, St Michael’s. If you go back along the lane, past the post office, and on out of the village, you’ll see a big farm, both sides of the road, then there’s a track off to your left. If you go over a little bridge and you get to the old rectory, on your right, you’ve gone too far.’
‘They all right, the people?’
‘Sure,’ Greg said. ‘Young couple. He’s American, an artist – book illustrator. Yeah, they’re fine.’
‘What’s the name?’
Gomer was suspicious by now. Gomer was always suspicious of fellers in suits asking questions. Not Greg, though; suspicious landlords didn’t sell many drinks.
‘Oh blimey, let me think. Goodfellow. Goodbody? Somefing like that.’
The paunchy bloke nodded. ‘Thanks, mate, we’ll go and knock on their door.’
‘You can take a picture of my pub, if you like,’ Greg said. ‘What is it, magazine, holiday guide?’
The two men looked at each other, swapping grins.
‘Something like that,’ said the one who did the talking.
The village hall was like one of those roadside garages built in the 1950s, with a grey-white facade and a stepped roof. From its summit projected a perspex cross which would obviously light up at night. Conifers crowded in on the building, so you had the feeling of a missionary chapel in the jungle.
It was coming up to 3.45 p.m., the sky turning brown, the air raw. As Sophie drove away, Merrily felt unexpectedly apprehensive. From inside, as she walked up the steps, came the sound of a hymn she didn’t recognize.
Below her, Old Hindwell was laid out in a V-shape. Beyond one arm arose the partly afforested hump which, Sophie had told her, was topped by the Iron Age hill fort, Burfa Camp. The northern horizon was broken by the shaven hills of Radnor Forest. The small, falling sun picked up the arc of a thin river around the boundary, like an eroded copper bangle.