‘I’d lock the door after us if I were you, Libby,’ Ellis said to the receptionist.
‘I’ll do that, Father.’
Ellis held open the main door for Merrily, looking over her head. ‘After you.’ She didn’t move. ‘Don’t make me ask the police to come in,’ Ellis said.
‘Could you clear up a few points for me, Nick?’
‘Goodnight.’
She had no confidence for this, still couldn’t quite believe it.
‘ “I am a brother to dragons”,’ Merrily said.
‘Go away.’ He didn’t look at her, opened the door wider.
‘Book of Job.’
‘I do know the Book of Job.’
The sounds of the street outside came in, carried on cold air, sounds alien to Old Hindwell – shouts, jeers, a man’s unstable voice, on high, ‘May God have mercy on you!’
‘I think your real name is Simon Wesson,’ Merrily said. ‘You went out to the States with your mother and sister in the mid-seventies, after the death of your stepfather. Over there, your mother married an evangelist called Marshall McAllman. You later became his personal assistant. He made a lot of money before he was exposed and disgraced and your mother divorced him – very lucratively, I believe.’
She couldn’t look at him while she was saying all this, terrified that it was going to be wrong, that Jane and Eirion had found the wrong person, that the journalist whose voice Sophie had so efficiently recorded was talking about someone with no connection at all to Nicholas Ellis.
‘McAllman concentrated on little backwoods communities. His technique was to do thorough research before he brought his show to town. He’d employ investigators. And although he would appear aloof when he first arrived...’
None of your good-old-boy stuff from Marshall, the journalist had told Sophie on the tape. Marshall was cool, Marshall was laid-back, Marshall would target a town that was hungry and he’d spread a table and he’d check into a hotel and sit back and wait for them to come sniffing and drooling...
‘... his remoteness only added to his mystique. They came to him – the local dignitaries, the civic leaders, the business people – and he passed on, almost reluctantly, what the Holy Spirit had communicated to him about them and their lives and their past and their future... and he convinced them that they and their town were riddled with all kinds of demons.’
Merrily focused on a wall poster about the symptoms of meningitis. She spoke in a low voice, could see Libby the receptionist straining to hear while pretending to rearrange leaflets behind the window of her hutch.
‘Time and time again, the local people would pull Marshall into the bosom of the community, everyone begging him to take away their demons, and their children’s demons... especially the daughters, those wayward kids. A little internal ministry... well, it beats abortion. He was a prophet and a local hero in different localities. He only went to selected places, little, introverted, no-hope places with poor communications – the places that were gagging for it.’
The print on the meningitis poster began to blur. She turned at last to look up at Ellis, his nose lifted in disdain, but she could see his hand whitening around the doorknob.
‘He taught you a lot, Nick, about the psychology of rural communities. And about manipulation. Plus, he gave you the inner strength and the brass neck to come back to this country and finally take on your hated, still-vengeful stepbrother.’
She stood in the doorway and waited.
Ellis closed the door again.
In the Black Lion, Jane saw Gomer was talking at the bar to a fat man of about thirty in a thick plaid shirt that came down halfway to his knees. At their table by the door, Sophie gathered her expensive and elegant camel coat over her knees to protect them from the draught.
‘I’d take you two back to Hereford with me, if I thought you’d stay put in the office.’
‘No chance.’ Jane ripped open a bag of crisps, stretched out her legs.
‘Nothing’s going to happen here, Jane,’ Sophie said. ‘The whole thing comes down to two obsessive men settling a childhood grudge.’
‘But what a grudge, Sophie. Serious, serious hatred fermenting for over a quarter of a century. A fundamentalist bigot and a warlock steeped in old magic. A white witch and a black Christian.’
‘Jane!’
‘He is. If you, like, subvert Christianity, if you use it aggressively to try and hurt or crush people of a different religion... or if you go around exorcizing demons out of people who haven’t actually got demons in them, just to get power over them – like this guy McAllman – then you’re using Christianity for evil, so that’s got to be black Christianity.’
‘I wouldn’t exactly call Bain a white witch, either,’ Eirion murmured.
Sophie said, ‘Jane, your grasp of theology—’
But Gomer was back with them, thoughtfully rolling and unrolling his cap. ‘That’s Nev,’ he said, watching the man in the plaid shirt go out. ‘My nephew, Nev, see. Er, some’ing’s come up, ennit? Mrs Hill, if there’s a chance you could stay with these kids till the vicar gets back...’
‘Uh-huh.’ Jane shook her head. ‘Mum said to stick with Gomer.’
Gomer sighed. He opened the pub door, peered out. Jane got up and leaned over his shoulder. There were still a lot of people out there and more police – about seven of them. Also, the guy in the plaid shirt standing by a truck. In the back of the truck was a yellow thing partly under a canvas cover.
‘What’s that?’ Jane demanded.
‘Mini-JCB.’
‘Like for digging?’
‘Sure t’be,’ Gomer admitted gruffly.
Ellis took her into the second surgery: a plain room with a big, dark desk, Victorian-looking. Authority. A big chair and a small chair. Ellis sat in the big chair; Merrily didn’t sit down. She was thinking rapidly back over the history of her faith, the unsavoury aspects.
In the Middle Ages, Christianity was still magic: charms and blessings indistinguishable. The Reformation was supposed to have wiped that out but, in seventeenth-century Britain, religious healers and exorcists were still putting on public displays, just like modern Bible Belt evangelists. And when it was finally over in most of Britain, here in Radnorshire – inside the inverted pentagram of churches dedicated to the warrior archangel – it continued. In a place with a strong tradition of pagan magic, the people transferred their allegiances to the priests... the more perspicacious of whom took on the role of the conjuror, the cunning man.
Few more cunning than Nicholas Ellis, formerly Simon Wesson. His face was unlined, bland, insolent – looking up at her but really looking down.
‘Where’s your mother now, Nick?’
‘Dead. Drowned in her swimming pool in Orlando, four years ago. An accident.’
‘Your sister?’
‘Still out there. Married with kids.’
‘You came back to Britain because of what happened over Marshall McAllman and this Tennessee newspaper?’
‘I’ve told you I won’t discuss that.’ He brought a hand down hard on the desk. He was sweating. ‘And if you say a word about any of this outside these walls, I shall instruct my solicitor to obtain an immediate injunction to restrain you and make preparations to take you to court for libel. Do you understand?’
‘This is Mr Weal, is it?’
‘Never underestimate him.’