‘Where did you get to, flower?’
‘Oh, Hereford and places. Shopping and stuff.’
‘What did you buy?’
‘Nothing much. Rowenna got… some things.’
‘She seems to have a lot of money,’ Merrily said, heating soup at the stove. ‘I suppose she’s indulged quite a bit, having to be dragged around the country with her father stationed at different bases.’
‘Yeah,’ Jane said noncommittally. She’d arrived home about seven – looking a bit pale, Merrily thought. Outside, it was snowing quite hard and sticking impressively to the ground and the trees. November snow; it couldn’t last, surely.
‘Where did Rowenna live before?’
‘What’s this about?’ said Jane.
‘Just interest. You seem to be spending a lot of time with her, that’s all.’
‘That,’ said Jane, ‘is because she’s interesting. They were at Malmesbury in Wiltshire. Her dad was with the Army at Salisbury or somewhere. They don’t like to talk about it, the SAS, so I don’t ask. Satisfied?’
Later, she said, ‘I’m sorry, Mum. I’m being a pig. Tired, that’s all. I think I’ll have an early night.’
Merrily didn’t argue; she wanted to be up early herself. She suspected there’d be a bigger congregation tomorrow than usual; people always liked going to church in the snow.
She was in bed by eleven, with a hot-water bottle. Less than ten minutes later, the phone bleeped.
‘Ledwardine Vic-’
‘Merrily, it’s Sophie at the Bishop’s office. I’m terribly sorry to bother you, but we’re having a problem – at the Cathedral. I wonder, could you perhaps come over?’
Big grey snowflakes tumbled against the window. Merrily sat up in bed. It had never felt so cold in here before.
‘What’s happened?’
‘I… it involves Canon Dobbs. I don’t like to say too much on the phone.’
Merrily switched on the bedside lamp. ‘Give me half an hour. Maybe forty-five minutes if the roads are bad.’
‘Oh God, yes, I didn’t realize. Do be careful.’
‘I’ll see you soon.’
When she came out of the bedroom, buttoning her jeans, she found Jane on the landing. ‘I heard the phone.’ She was in her dressing-gown, and mustn’t have been asleep.
‘Some kind of problem at the Cathedral.’
‘Why should that concern you?’
‘I don’t really know.’
‘Shall I come? It looks a bit rough out there.’
‘God, no. You get back to bed.’
‘What if you get stuck? These roads can be really nasty and the council’s mega-slow off the mark – like about three days, apparently.’
‘It’s a big car. I’ll be fine.’
‘This is like Deliverance business again, isn’t it?’
‘To be honest, I just don’t know.’
‘Talk about secrecy,’ Jane said, strangely wide awake. ‘You Deliverance guys make the SAS seem like double-glazing salesmen.’
Why had she imagined the Cathedral would be all lit up? Maybe because that was how she’d been hoping to find it: a beacon of Old Christian warmth and strength.
But in the snow and the night, she was more than ever aware of how set-apart it had become. Once it had stood almost next to the medieval castle, two powerhouses together; now the city was growing away from the river, and the castle had vanished. The Cathedral crouched, black on white, like the Church at bay.
Merrily parked on Broad Street, near the central library. The dashboard clock, always five to ten minutes fast, indicated near-midnight. It had been a grindingly slow journey, with her window wound down to let the cigarette smoke out and the arctic air in, just to keep her awake. She’d taken the longer, wider route east of the Wye, where there was always some traffic, even the chance of snowploughing if anyone in the highways department had happened to notice a change in the weather. The road-surface was white and brown and treacherous, snow-lagged trees slumped over it like gross cauliflowers.
It all still seemed so unlikely – what would Hunter want with her at this time of night? Was he trying to turn Deliverance into the Fourth Emergency Service?
Merrily locked the Volvo, put on her gloves, pulled up her hood and set out across the snow-quilted silence of Broad Street.
No one about, not even a drunk in view. No traffic at all. The city centre as you rarely saw it: luminous and Christmas-card serene, snowflakes like big stars against the blue-black. Merrily’s booted steps were muted on the padded pavement. Behind her only the Green Dragon had lights on. She felt conspicuous. There was no sign of the Bishop or the Bishop’s men. Hadn’t a woman once been raped in the Cathedral’s shadow? Hadn’t the last time she’d been called out at night…?
Christ be with me, Christ within me.
The Cathedral was towered and turreted, the paths and the green lawns submerged together in snow, a white moat around God’s fortress. But no other night defences; its guardians – the canons and the vergers – were sleeping in the warren of cloisters behind. Nobody about except…
‘Merrily!’
Sophie came hurrying around the building, towards the North Porch, following the bouncing beam of a torch attached to a large shadow beside her.
Merrily breathed normally again.
‘Thank heavens you made it.’ The Bishop’s secretary lived not five minutes’ walk away, in a quiet Victorian villa near the Castle Green. She wore a long sheepskin coat, her white hair coming apart under a woollen scarf. ‘We were just wondering whether to call Michael, after all.’
‘But I thought the Bishop-’
‘He doesn’t know anything about this,’ Sophie said quickly.
‘Do you know George Curtiss?’
‘Good evening, Mrs Watkins. I, ah, think we have met.’
‘Oh, yes. Hello.’ He was one of the Cathedral canons: a big, overcoated man with a beard of Greek Orthodox proportions and a surprisingly hesitant reedy voice.
‘George called me to ask if we should tell Michael about this,’ Sophie said. ‘But I suggested we consult you. This is all very difficult.’
‘Look, I’m sorry… Am I supposed to know what’s happening?’
‘You tell her, George.’
‘Yes, it’s… Oh dear.’ George Curtiss glanced behind him to make sure they were alone, bringing down his voice. ‘It’s about old, ah, Tom Dobbs, I’m afraid.’
‘Merrily,’ Sophie was hugging herself, ‘he’s virtually barricaded himself in. We think he’s…’
‘Drunk, I rather fear,’ George said.
‘What?’
‘He’s behind that partition,’ Sophie said. ‘You know, where they’re repairing the Cantilupe tomb?’
‘He’s in there with-?’
‘Chained and padlocked himself in. He won’t talk to us. He’s just rambling. To someone else? To himself? I don’t know. Rambling on and on. Neither of us understands, but I just… well, I rather suspected you might. It’s all… it’s rather frightening, actually.’
‘So there is a’ – Merrily swallowed – ‘a Deliverance context?’
What a stupid question.
‘Oh, yes,’ Sophie said, ‘I think so. Don’t you?’
George Curtiss shuffled impatiently. ‘I trust we can, ah, rely on your discretion, Mrs Watkins. I know he’s an odd character, but I do have a long-standing admiration for the man. As does… as does the Dean.’
‘But I don’t know him. I’ve never even spoken to him.’
‘He’s, ah, had his problems,’ George said. ‘Feels rather beleaguered – threatened by… by certain recent developments. In view of these, we’d rather avoid involving the Dean – or the Bishop – at this stage.’
‘But I don’t know him. And he-’
‘But you know what he does, Merrily,’ Sophie whispered urgently.
‘Do I?’
‘Mrs Watkins.’ George Curtis coughed. ‘We all know what he does, if not the, ah, technicalities of it. It’s just we’re a little nervous about what’s… going on in there.’
‘You want me to try and talk to him?’
‘Just listen, I suppose.’ Sophie tightened her scarf. ‘Interpret for us.’
‘My Latin isn’t what it used to be,’ George said.
‘Latin?’
George dragged a long breath through the brambles of his beard, but his voice still came out weakly. ‘My impression is he’s talking to, ah… to, ah… to St Thomas.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Merrily said.
Sophie almost snapped at her, ‘You think we do?’
They followed George Curtiss and his torch around the building to St John’s door, which was used mainly by the clergy and the vergers. Snow was already spattered up the nearby walls.
‘We’ll go in very quietly,’ George said, as though addressing a party of schoolchildren – he was one of the regular tourguides, Merrily recalled. ‘I sometimes think the Dean has ultrasonic hearing.’
Merrily stepped warily inside – as if a mad-eyed Dobbs might come rampaging at them, swinging his crucifix.
Drunk? If Dobbs had a drink problem, it was the first she’d heard about it. But if the old exorcist had become a public embarrassment, the Dean could no longer be seen to support him. That way the Dean would himself lose face. And if the Bishop found out, he would make the most of it – in the most discreet way, of course – to strengthen his position as an engine of reform, get rid of Dobbs, and perhaps the Dean as well.
Can of worms!
Although it felt no warmer inside, Merrily unzipped her waxed coat and put a hand to the bump in her sweater, her pectoral cross.
This was because the atmosphere in the Cathedral was different.
Live?
Sophie touched her arm. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes.’ Merrily remembered reading once that gothic churches somehow recharged themselves at night, like battery packs. She felt again the powerful inner call to prayer she’d experienced on the afternoon she’d emerged from the shell-like chantry to encounter Dobbs and the woman.
‘I won’t put on any lights,’ George whispered. ‘Don’t want to draw undue, ah… attention.’
He snapped off his torch for a moment. The only illumination now was the little aumbry light over the cupboard holding the emergency sacrament: wine and wafers in a silver container. Merrily felt a desperate, vibrating desire to kneel before it.
There was no sound at all.
‘All right.’ George switched on his torch again, and they followed its bobbing beam through the Lady Chapel and into the North Transept, where the great stained-glass window reared over the temporary screening partition hiding the dismantled tomb of St Thomas Cantilupe. George shone his torch over the various posters drawing-pinned to it, telling the story of Cantilupe – a wise and caring bishop, according to the Cathedral guidebook, who stood firm against evil in all its guises.
George stopped and called out harshly, ‘Thomas?’ as though he hadn’t intended to – as though the word had been wrenched out of him.
Merrily quivered for an instant.
Thomas? – as if he was summoning the spirit of Cantilupe.
He might as well have been. There was no response.
Merrily looked at Sophie. ‘You’re sure he’s still…?’
George moved across and shone his torch on the plywood partition door. Merrily remembered a padlocked chain connecting steel staples on the outside.
‘All this will be taken down quite soon,’ George said. ‘They’re putting the tomb back together next week.’
The chain appeared to have been dragged inside through a half-inch crack between the ill-fitting door and its frame. Dobbs – or someone else – had to be still behind it.
Merrily said, ‘Do you feel anything?’
‘I feel quite annoyed, actually,’ Sophie muttered. ‘Why isn’t he doing… what he was doing earlier? You’ll think we only dragged you here on a such a dreadful night on some sort of perverse whim.’
‘No. The atmosphere, Sophie – the atmosphere’s somehow… I don’t know… disarranged.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve never been in here at night before. Not like this, anyway.’
She had a feeling of overhead cables cut, slashed through. Of them hanging down now, still live and dangerous.
‘Thomas?’ George rapped on the plywood door. ‘Thomas, it’s George. Getting a bit anxious about you, old chap.’
‘Something’s happened,’ Merrily said suddenly. ‘Can you break it down?’
‘Thomas!’ George slapped the partition with a leather-gloved hand. ‘Are you there?’
‘Break it down!’
He swung round. ‘This is a cathedral, Mrs Watkins.’
‘Maybe you can snap the chain?’
‘I can’t even reach the chain.’
‘Kick the door.’
‘I… I can’t.’
Merrily hurriedly unzipped her coat and slipped out of it. ‘Stand back, then. I’ll do it.’
‘No, I… Thomas! For God’s sake!’ George put an ear to the crack between the door and the frame. ‘Stop… wait… I can hear…’
Merrily went still.
‘I can hear him breathing,’ George said. ‘Can you hear that?’
She turned her back to the plywood screen, steadying her own breathing. She rubbed her eyes. Think practically, think rationally. When she turned back, both George and Sophie were staring at her. And the air in the high transept was still invisibly untidy with snipped wires.
‘All right.’ Big George began to unbutton his overcoat. ‘I’ll do it.
He wore fat, black boots. Doc Martens probably, size eleven at least. With equipment like that, he could bring the whole damned partition crashing down.
He gave Merrily the rubber-covered torch, which felt moist. By its light, she saw that his brown eyes were wide and scared, and a froth of spittle glistened in his beard.
‘Christ be with us,’ Merrily heard herself saying.