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Jane’s face fell. ‘What do we do now?’
‘A technical brick wall.’ Sophie sighed. ‘Hard to imagine how we survived for so long without all this.’ Then she did something most un-Sophie-like – stamped her foot. ‘Phone them, child! They presumably have telephones in Goshawk, Tennessee. If this publication still exists, it shouldn’t take long to find the number. If it doesn’t, we shall have to think of something else. Get on to international directory enquiries.’
‘I don’t know how.’
Sophie sighed in mild contempt. ‘Leave it to me.’ She stalked out.
‘Wow,’ Jane said. ‘The turbo twinset.’
Eirion smiled his Eirion smile. It did things to her, but this was not the time. There never seemed to be a time. The sudden urgency manifested by Sophie made Jane quite tense. What if someone was ringing home with information far more important than anything they could hope to find on the Net, and she wasn’t there to relay it. Paranoid, she rang the vicarage answering machine. One message for Mum to call Uncle Ted. Sod that.
‘We seem to be drifting a long way from Kali Three,’ Eirion said. He started to key it in.
‘No, don’t.’ Jane leapt up and stood at the window, staring down at the woodpile below. There was a sense of being very close to something, but it was too indistinct, ghostly. She felt that invoking Kali Three would somehow bring bad luck. She turned back to the room.
‘We have to go there.’
‘Old Hindwell?’ Eirion said. ‘I’m not sure about that. Why?’
‘We just do.’
‘Absolutely not.’ Sophie was in the doorway.
‘Sophie, there’s some really heavy—’
‘Don’t you think your mother has enough to worry about? Sit down and speak to the man from the paper. Or would you prefer me to do it? Perhaps it might be better if I did.’
‘She’s right,’ Eirion said. ‘She’s going to sound so much more authoritative than either of us. Especially to Joe-Bob McCabe, of the Goshawk Talon.’
‘Ah sure lerve your accent, ma’am,’ said Jane. The only person from Tennessee she’d ever heard talk was Elvis.
‘The man’s name,’ said Sophie, ‘is Eliot Williams. He’s busy at the moment, but his editor’s getting him to call me back. I think he rather senses a story.’
‘Wow,’ Jane said, ‘you’re, like, incredible.’
But Sophie had already returned to her office, where the phone was ringing.
46
Nine Points
A DARK, VICTORIAN living room. Merrily imprisoned in the lap of a huge, high-sided leather armchair, coat folded on her knees, cup and saucer on top of that.
Judith Prosser was adept at disadvantaging her visitors.
‘And since when is religion a matter for the police, Mrs Watkins?’
‘When it’s sexual assault.’ Merrily drank some of the coffee. Perversely, it was good coffee.
‘Do you know what I think?’ Judith’s own chair put her about a foot higher than Merrily. ‘I’ve been enquiring about you, and do you know what I think? I think that Father Ellis has dared to intrude into what you consider to be your back yard. He is doing what you think only you should be doing.’
‘You think I’d do—?’
‘How would I know what namby-pamby thing you would do these days, when the Church is like a branch of the social services?’ A withering contempt for both.
‘Now we’re getting to it,’ Merrily said.
‘Are we, Mrs Watkins?’
Merrily tried to sit up in the chair. She felt like a child. Around the walls were dozens of photographs, mostly of men wearing chains of office, although a group of more recent ones showed boys with motorbikes and trophies.
‘What are “we” getting to?’ Judith leaned back, arms folded.
‘The question of Old Hindwell preferring to do its own thing. Which is kind of admirable in one sense, I suppose.’
Judith reared up. ‘It is entirely admirable, my girl. This is an independent part of the world. What do we need with the mandarins in Cardiff and London and Canterbury? The English. Even the Welshies... they all think they can come out yere and do what they like. When Councillor Prosser was on the old Radnor District Council, they used to have to employ young officials, trotting out their fancy ideas – hippies and vegetarians, half of them. It was, “Oh, you can’t build there... you have to use this colour of slate on your roofs... you can’t do this, you can’t do that.” Well, they were put in their place soon enough. The local people, it is, who decides. We know what’s needed, we know what works. And Father Ellis, even though he’s not from yere, is a man with old values and a clear, straightforward, practical approach, based on tradition. He understands tradition.’
Merrily was tired of this. ‘How many people has he exorcized so far?’
‘I can tell you that all of them have come freely to him and asked for it to be done.’
‘Like your son?’
A pause. ‘Gomer Parry again, I suppose.’
‘Doesn’t matter where it came from. I just wondered if your son actually went along to Ellis and asked to be cleansed of the taking-and-driving-away demon.’
‘His parents took him.’ Judith scowled. ‘Another problem in today’s world is that parents don’t take responsibility. We took him to Father Ellis, Councillor Prosser and I. It was our duty.’
‘And you really think he had a demon inside him that demanded the full casting-out bit?’
‘Oh... Mrs... Watkins...’ Exasperated, Judith stood and went to lean an arm on the high mantelpiece. ‘They all have demons in them, whether it’s mischievous imps or worse. In the old days, the demons were beaten out of them at school. Now, if a teacher raises a hand to a child, he’s in court for assault, and nothing the poor magistrate can do to help him.’
‘I see.’ There was an awful logic to this: exorcism as a tool of public order. Evidently the local women had decided that the wanton demon in Marianne Starkey – which perhaps made some local men a little restless, a touch frisky – should be eradicated before it led to trouble. Marianne’s reaction to the male witch adding a piquantly topical flavour to the exercise.
‘Menna,’ Merrily said. ‘What about Menna?’
Judith brought her arm slowly down to her side, stiffening ever so slightly.
‘Judith, did Menna herself go to Father Ellis and beg for exorcism, to get rid of the molesting spirit of Mervyn Thomas?’
Judith was silent.
‘Or was it J.W.’s idea? In his role as husband. And father figure.’
Judith said, eyes unmoving, ‘How do you know she was cleansed?’
‘Wasn’t she?’
‘Is that any business of yours or mine?’ First sign of a significant loss of cool. ‘What would I know about the private affairs of Mr and Mrs J.W. Weal? Was I supposed to be her guardian and her keeper all her life?’
‘You were obviously still concerned about her. You went to visit her regularly. You were still, by all accounts, her only real friend. You were the best person to realize she was... still a victim.’
‘He loved her!’
‘He suffocated her, Mrs Prosser. When she was in hospital, he tended her, he washed her, hardly let the nurses near her. I saw him with a bowl of water, as if he was baptizing her all over again. As if he was somehow confirming and reinforcing what Father Ellis had done.’