'No, but I been thinkin' of Danny Thomas. That boy knew all the hippies, see. Most locals they didn't have nothin' to do with 'em, but Danny, 'e was right in there. Up in court for growin' cannabis, the whole bit. You want me to get Danny on the phone?'

'It's a bit late,' Merrily suggested.

'Boy don't keep normal farmin' hours,' Gomer said.

Danny Thomas had now turned down the music. In Danny's barn there were speaker cabinets the size of wardrobes, all covered with chicken shit. Gomer also recalled an intercom on the wall. Bawling down it at Danny when he was wanted on the phone was how most folk reckoned Greta's voice had reached air-raid siren level.

It must be cold tonight out in Danny's barn, but Danny would jump around a lot to the music before collapsing into the hay with a joint. Gomer pictured him sitting on a bale, straggly grey hair down the back of his donkey jacket, with Jimi at his feet Mid-Wales's only deaf sheepdog.

Gomer sat on the edge of the vicar's desk and waited while Greta had summoned Danny back to the farmhouse.

'What's goin' down, Gomer, my man? You become a private eye, is it? Every bugger I meet these days, they just been grilled by Gomer Parry.'

'All right, listen to me, boy,' Gomer said. 'Give your ole drug-raddled memory a rattle on the subject of Terry Penney.'

A few seconds of quiet. Bit of a rarity around Danny unless he'd had a puff or two.

'Poor bugger,' he says at last.

'Come to a sad end, what I yeard.'

'I liked ole Terry.'

'You go to 'is church?'

'Din't like him that much. But he was all right. He lent me his Dylan albums. This to do with that bugger Ellis? Tricky bastard, he is. Blew poor ole Gret's mind. Gets 'em all in a bloody trance.'

'Why'd he do it, Danny? Why'd Penney fill up the ole brook with good pews?'

'Dope, ennit?'

'Ar, well, that's what they all says. Don't mean bugger all.'

Danny went quiet again.

'What you know about Penney, Danny? What you know about Penney you en't sayin'?'

'Long while back, Gomer. Terry's dead. Let the poor bugger lie.'

'Can't.'

'It's that vicar o' yours, ennit? Diggin' the dirt.'

'We needs to know, boy.'

'Gimme a day or so to think about it.'

'Can't. C'mon, Danny, who's it gonner harm?'

'Me.' Danny's voice went thin. 'I'm as guilty as any bugger, Gomer. It was me got Terry into it. Well... me and Coll.'

'Dr Coll?'

'Me and Dr Coll,' Danny says. 'And the bloody era that promised us the earth. And here we all are nigh on forty year later and further in the shit.'

'Stay there,' Gomer said. 'Don't move.'

When Betty Thorogood started to cry, it turned everything around.

Until now, talking about a world she knew, she'd been cool and assured. The otherworldly visions and gods and archetypes did not scare her, any more than neuroses scared a psychologist. In the everyday world, implicated in the death of a harmless widow, Betty came apart.

'I just wanted to help her. I was sorry for her... that's all there was to it.'

Jane had moved her chair back, appalled. Witches don't cry! Merrily leaned across the table, put a hand over Betty's.

Betty parted her hair, peered at Merrily through her tears. 'What if their tests show up something nasty in that potion I gave her? Something I didn't put there.'

'What are they going to find? Henbane? Deadly night-shade? Rat poison? He doesn't need all that. He's got natural causes, apparently hastened by her overreliance on you.'

'I just don't understand why she would stop taking the pills he'd prescribed. She thought he was wonderful. She thought...' Betty's eyes filled up again. 'She thought everyone was wonderful. Everyone who tried to help her. The local people were so good. Because she was from Off, anyone local who didn't actually spit on her front step seemed wonderful and caring. I was so sorry for her. And dying there, in her chair, in front of that lukewarm fire... Perhaps he is telling the truth. Perhaps poor, fuddled Mrs Wilshire thought my little herbal remedy, bottled under the moon, was some sort of cure-all.'

'There's an experienced nurse I know,' Merrily said. 'Perhaps I'll give her a call.'

She stopped as Gomer returned. His glasses shone like twin torch-bulbs.

'Come and talk to Danny, vicar.'

40.

Key to the Kingdom AS DANNY TALKED, the picture formed for Merrily in ragged, fluttering colours. Radnor Forest in the 1960s and 1970s: hippy paradise.

The flower children had wandered in from Off and settled in this border country in their hundreds because it was cheap and remote. They rented or even bought half-ruined cottages far from the roads. Thin boys in yellow trousers chopping wood from the hedges. Beautiful, long-haired girls in ankle-length medieval dresses fetching water from the well.

In spite of the electricity supply being at best intermittent, they brought the new music why, The Incredible String Band even lived for a while near Llandegley towards the northwestern end of the Forest.

And the dope. The hippies also brought the dope.

The local people were amused rather than hostile the hippies didn't do any damage and they were always a talking point.

And for some like Danny Thomas, dreamy, faraway farmer's boy this was what they'd been waiting for all their lives. When it was really happening Danny was good and ready; he figured he must've been born a hippy growing up on Elvis, then the Beatles, popping purple hearts to groove all night and still be awake in time to milk the cows.

Merrily smiled.

And then cannabis. Danny had acquired his first joint at a dance in Llandod, with another to smoke in the top field after sunset. He did a bit of dealing for a while, but he was never much good at that and, besides, there was a much more reliable dealer emerging in the area. Better just to grow the stuff nice, sheltered spot, in Bryncot Dingle and then give it away. Danny was so excited by the dawning of this incredible new world that, by the summer of 1975, he was wanting to turn on the whole Forest.

'Who was this "more reliable dealer"?' Merrily asked. 'Can I take a guess?'

Danny was talking freely now, his voice hoarse but liquid, like wet ash. Dr Coll had been the son of a surgeon at Hereford Hospital with a house in New Radnor. Still a medical student back then, in need of a few quid, like all your students. 'Medical students always got their sources, ennit?' Danny said.

'He was a hippy, too?'

'Lord, no. Dr Coll en't never been a hippy, not even as a boy. Just a feller with a eye to a few quid. Course when he qualified as a doctor, that all come to an end. Gotter keep 'is nose clean. Or at least keep it lookin' clean.'

And there would have been better ways of making money by then, Merrily thought. 'What about Terry Penney? When did he appear?' From what Betty had learned from Mrs Pottinger and from what Sophie had passed on to Merrily, Penney had emerged as a bright boy, but impressionable, and not too well-off. But what Danny was saying produced a different picture: Terry was an upper-middle-class radical with a posh, wealthy girlfriend who everyone thought was his wife, until she found life in Radnor seriously lacking and went back to the Smoke, leaving the vicar of Old Hindwell to grow his hair and smoke dope with the likes of Danny Thomas.

Terry, like Danny, was finding the times life-enhancing and life-changing. But Terry also saw it from a religious perspective: drugs opening the doors of perception, the gates of the soul. Terry was a fan of the seventeenth-century poet, Thomas Traherne, who had found secrets of the universe in Herefordshire meadows.

The dope had certainly elevated and coloured Terry's faith in God. Today, perhaps he'd be all happy-clappy and singing-in-tongues, like Ellis, and perhaps the drugs would have represented a passing phase. But it was a never-ending inner journey, then. Terry and Danny would smoke dope, untroubled by the law and Danny discovered that he loved the whole world and Terry loved the world and God. Terry believed that the time was coming when all mankind would be herbally awakened to the splendour of the Lord.

Then Dr Coll brought the acid along.

Merrily nodded. Acid had been something different. Not just another drug, but the key to serious religious experience, a direct line to God. To Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, all those guys, LSD was the light on the road to Damascus, and anyone could get there.

So, one fine, warm day, Terry Penney and Danny Thomas and Dr Coll had found a shady corner of a Radnor Valley field, overlooking the Four Stones. They had their lumps of sugar and Dr Coll brought out the lysergic acid. An experiment, he said. He wouldn't take any himself; he'd supervise, make sure they came to no harm.

Danny's trip lasted for ever. Under the perfumed, satin sky, he went through whole lifetimes in one afternoon. He found that the Radnor Valley was in his blood... really in his blood the whole landscape turning to liquid and jetting through his veins. When he looked at the inside of his wrist he could see through the skin and into that fast-flowing land. He was the land, he was the valley, he was the forest. He walked through the silken grass down to the Four Stones, which he now understood to hold the mind of the valley, and Dr Coll said afterwards he had to stop Danny beating his head on the prehistoric stones to get inside them because the stones knew the secret.

The Reverend Penney, meanwhile, came to believe he'd been granted access to the very kingdom of heaven.

He saw an angel, a giant angel with his feet astride the valley. Merrily imagined a great William Blake angel with the red sun in his wings and a raised sword which cleaved the hills.

Life was never going to be the same again for either Terry or Danny. Danny was still tripping when he got home to the farm and he walked down the yard and saw the depth of sorrow in the eyes of the beautiful pigs and realized how much he loved those pigs. To this day, Danny Thomas said, he wouldn't see a pig ever killed.

He and Terry took four more trips together. Terry told Danny that he knew now that he had seen the Archangel Michael, who had been appointed to guard the forest and the Radnor Valley, because this was a great doorway through which you could enter the kingdom. Terry found a book by the Reverend Parry-Jones who'd been vicar at Llanfihangel Rhydithon back in the twenties and he too thought the Forest was special, but he also mentioned a dragon that you could hear breathing in the night, and Terry said this was no surprise because places of great spiritual power were equally attractive to devilish forces.

Terry considered it no accident that he had been brought here, now, at this time of spiritual awakening, to be the priest of one of St Michael's churches. He had told Danny he was going to call a meeting of all the other St Michael clergy around the Forest because they were destined to work together. But this never happened, because the other ministers had all heard about Terry Penney.

Still Terry insisted he was being groomed by God for the Big Task. Every day, before dawn, he'd kneel before his altar in Old Hindwell Church and beg God and St Michael that his mission might be revealed to him.

But God held out on him.

Terry decided he was not yet worthy, did not yet know enough, was not yet pure enough. He stopped smoking cannabis and concentrated on reading the Book of Revelation a hundred times. He wrote out important verses from it on sheets of white card and hung them around his room at the old rectory. His sermons became impenetrably apocalyptic. He began to research St Michael and the lives of those saints and mystics who had become obsessed by the warrior archangel. He made solemn pilgrimages to all the St Michael churches around Radnor Forest... approaching each from the direction of the last, walking the final mile barefoot after a day's fasting.

'Local people was startin' to go off him in a big way,' Danny said. 'Local people don't like it when their vicar gets talked about in other parishes.'

Terry Penney had walked barefoot across the bridge to the church of St Michael, Cefnllys an awesome setting, where an entire medieval town had been laid out under its castle. Then Terry had hiked unshod across the bleak Penybont Common to Llanfihangel Rhydithon. Next, he'd come down from the Forest to the yews encircling the rebuilt roadside church at Llanfihangel nant Melan. And finally he'd tramped on callused feet along the sombre, narrow road to Cascob, where he'd stood before the old Abracadabra charm.

It was three weeks after this that Terry had that visit from Councillor Prosser, wondering why he hadn't applied for a grant towards the upkeep of the old building.

Two weeks later, Terry trashed the church.

What had happened, Danny said, was that one night Terry came to the conclusion that God wanted him to go alone into St Michael's, Old Hindwell, and open himself to revelation.

In fact, drop some acid.

Danny had obtained the LSD for Terry from Dr Coll. The price had gone up by then, acid being in demand, but Terry didn't care. In fact, the idea of the priest taking a trip in his own parish church bothered Danny more than Terry.

'For starters, he wouldn't 'ave nobody with him. Dr Coll was back home at the time, but Terry wouldn't 'ave him to supervise nor me. Had to be just him an' God, see. Terry reckoned nothin' bad was gonner happen to him in the house of God. But me, I wouldn't've gone in there alone at night in a million year, with or without drugs creepy ole place like that.'

'Bad trip?'

'Had a bad one meself, few months later,' Danny said. 'Kept gettin' flashbacks for bloody weeks. Scared the shit out o' me. Anyway, the next time I seen Terry, the boy was a mess. Hadn't shaved, din't smell too good. Smelt of fear, you know?'

'Yes.'

'I don't know what 'appened to Terry Penney that night. I just sits in yere, hammering buggery out o' the ole Les Paul and I remembers the good times.'

'You must have asked him about it?'

'Terry din't wanner talk about it at all, vicar. Kept 'isself to 'isself. And then they finds bits o' church floatin' down the brook, and Terry's gone. I used to wonder whether the boy seen the carvings on the wood screen come alive, or whether he seen... I dunno...'

'The dragon?' Merrily said.

'He seen St Michael out in that field. Mabbe 'e seen the dragon in 'is own church?'

Merrily recalled the William Blake print in Nick Ellis's war room. The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun relating to an image from Revelation about the dragon waiting for the woman to give birth so that it could devour the child. The dragon was said to have seven heads and ten horns. It was not a nice dragon, and Blake's painting throbbed with a transcendent evil.

'I don't know how much of this Ellis knows,' Merrily said, telling them as they sat around the kitchen table, 'but it would account for a lot. If he believes Penney had a black vision of the dragon inside that church Satan rising, or in his view paganism rising and if we believe what he told me about being the subject of some kind of hate campaign, forecasting a return of the dragon...'

Poison-pen letters for months. And phone calls cackling voices in the night. Recently had a jagged scratch removed from my car bonnet. Series of chevrons... like a dragon's back.

'... then, to him, Betty, you and Robin are the embodiment of something that already exists in those ruins on a metaphysical level.'

'It's not true, though,' Betty said. 'We didn't know anything about Penney. We didn't even know for certain that the church had been built on an ancient site until we'd bought it.'

'How do you know that now?'

'Well, after we learned about all the prehistoric archaeology in the area, it seemed like it was on the cards. Also this probably won't cut much ice with you a friend of ours went round with a dowsing rod and pendulum.'

'Jane, do we have an Ordnance Survey map handy?'

'Brilliant!' Jane leapt up.

Mr Penney came out with what was described to me as a lot of nonsensical gobbledegook relating to the layout of churches around Radnor Forest.

Betty said that Robin had tried to work out a pattern on the map, but they had been aware of only three St Michael churches at the time.

'OK.' Jane had returned with the map, spread it out on the table. 'You'll have to help me out here, Gomer. Where's Cascob?'

Gomer found it after a bit of peering. He also found St Michael's, Cefnllys, then Llanfihangel Rhydithon and Llanfihangel nant Melan. Jane encircled them along with Old Hindwell (ruins of).