Scumbag.

You couldn't miss the village hall, with that cross lit up on the roof. As soon as you turned up the track to the steps, you could hear the singing. A song which had no tune but lots of tunes, and endless words but no sense.

Jane started racing up the steps, saw that the hall was blazing with light. But, at the same time, she became aware that Gomer, behind her, was panting quite painfully. It had been a gruelling night and you tended to forget how old he was and how many roll-ups he smoked. She stopped halfway up and waited for him to catch up.

She reckoned afterwards, after the glass in the porch burst and the flames came out in a great gouging whooomp of heat, that Gomer's lungs had probably saved their lives.

51.

Laid to Unrest THE LAUREL ALLEY.

Later, its leaves would be crisp with frost. Merrily could see only the alley's outline, rippling black walls under the worn pebble moon.

'We could use a torch.'

'Amply bright enough,' Judith said, 'if you know the way.'

Which she, of course, did. She took Merrily's arm, leading her down to the fork in the drive. 'Mind the step, now.' Merrily remembered Marianne's hand on her arm, as the police burst through. Things you oughta know. Judith's grip was firmer. Judith was without trepidation. What did Judith believe in? Not ghosts, perhaps not even God except maybe some strictly local deity, the guardian spirit of Old Hindwell.

At the corner of the rectory, where the drive split, Merrily looked for a car, but there was just an empty space. J.W. Weal had gone to don his Masonic apron. It must look like a postage stamp on him. Lodge night: a crude ritual structure to further stiffen his already rigid life.

The police had gone, too, now. There seemed to have been a winding-down of the action at the gates of St Michael's. Nothing to see or hear when Merrily and Judith had walked past the farm entrance.

They dropped down to the tarmac and then the crazy paving to the lawn. Sharp conifers were all around, pricking stars. Merrily glanced back once at the grey-stone rectory, at the angular bulge of the bay window: lightless, no magisterial shadows of furniture, no frenetic flickering, crackling...

Stop it!

'Something bothering you, Mrs Watkins?'

'Nothing at all, Mrs Prosser.'

At the end of the lawn, pale grey and shining slightly, was the squat conical building, the wine store... ice house... now tomb. Merrily stumbled on a lump in the lawn; Judith's arm easily found her waist, helped her up. Merrily tightened inside. It was about here that Weal had wrapped his arms around her, lifting her, whirling her around. Men-na.

Merrily shivered suddenly, and Judith knew.

'You're frightened.'

'I'm cold.' She clutched her blue airline bag to her side.

'As you wish.' Judith bit the end of one of her leather gloves to pull it off and produced from a pocket something that jingled: the keys to the mausoleum. 'But it will, I'm afraid, be even colder in here.'

When Betty had been talking for a while calm, succinct, devastating someone actually got up, went over and switched on all the lights. Hard reality time.

It was a starkly meaningful moment. Robin stared in cold dismay around the parlour, with its damp patches, its dull fire of smoky, sizzling green twigs, its sad assembly of robed witches and the crown of lights on the floor like some unfinished product of a kids' handicraft class left behind at the end of the semester.

It all looked like some half-assed fancy dress party that never quite took off. The air was sick with confusion, incomprehension, embarrassment affecting everyone here, except for Ned Bain, who was still entirely relaxed in the lotus position, his butt on the stone-flag floor.

And Betty, in her green medieval robe, remained expressionless, having come out with stuff about Ned that Robin, with his famously huge imagination, couldn't begin to fathom how she'd gotten hold of. Was that where she'd been last night obtaining Ned Bain's life story? And never saying a word to Robin because he was this big-mouthed asshole whom all subtlety deserted the second he put away his paints.

He felt royally betrayed, shafted up the ass, by everyone. Like, how many of them already knew this? How many knew that Nicholas Ellis was Bain's stepbrother, who covered up for his old lady after she stabbed Bain's father to death? Was this some British Wiccan conspiracy, to which only he was denied access?

But Robin only had to look at Vivvie's pinched and frozen face to be pretty damn sure that few, if any, of them had been aware of it all. They might've known about Ned's father and the lingering bitterness over his killing, but not about the real identity of the saintly Nick Ellis.

'Ned...' Max came to his feet, nervously massaging his massive beard. 'I do rather think we're due an explanation.'

All of them, except for Betty, were now looking over at black-robed Ned Bain, still relaxed, but moody now, kind of saturnine. Betty, having rolled a grenade into the room, just gazed down into her lap.

Ned brought his hands together, elbows tucked inside his knees, the sleeves of his robe falling back. He smiled ruefully, slowly shaking his head. Then, in the face of Max's evident disapproval, he brought out a packet of cigarettes and a small lighter, and they had to wait while he organized himself a smoke.

'First of all, what Betty says is broadly correct.' He sounded kind of detached, like it was dope he was smoking. 'My father married Frances Wesson, and our intelligent, freethinking, liberal household changed almost overnight into a strict Christian, grace-at-mealtimes, church-twice-on-Sunday bloody purgatory. Icons on every wall, religious tracts on every flat surface... and the beatific face of my smug, pious little stepbrother. Well, of course I hated him. I hated him long before he lied to the police.'

There was another smoky silence.

'So Simon Wesson... changed his name?' Max prompted.

'I believe Ellis was Frances's maiden name. She'd already met the appalling Marshall McAllman during one of his early missions to the UK, but this only became evident later.'

'In other words,' said Max, too obviously anxious to help Ned clear up this little misunderstanding, 'with the promise of American nouveaux riches, your father had somewhat outlived his usefulness.'

'Oh, I've conjured a number of scenarios, Max, in the years since none of which allows for the possibility of my father's death being self-defence. Simon knows the truth. I realized part of my destiny was to make him bloody well confess it. It became a focus for me, led me into areas I might never have entered. Into Wicca.'

Robin saw Betty look up, her green eyes hard, but lit with intelligence and insight. There would be no get-outs, no short cuts. Ned Bain took another drag at his cigarette.

'I'd tried to be a simple iconoclast at first, telling myself I was an atheist. Then, for a while I'd be about nineteen I was into ceremonial magic. Until I realized that was as cramped and pompous as Frances's High Church Christianity. Only paganism appeared free of such crap, and there was a great sense of release. Naked, elemental, no hierarchy it was what I needed.'

Betty said, without looking up, 'How long have you known about this place?'

'Oh, only since Simon arrived here. Since he took over the church hall. Since he became "Father Ellis". When he first came back to Britain, he was a curate in the north-east, but that was no use to me. He wasn't doing anything that left him... open. I'd had people watching him in America for years there's an enormous pagan network over there now, happy to be accessed. And other links too.'

'Like Kali Three?' Betty said.

Robin saw Bain throw her a short, knife-like glance; she didn't even react. 'I used several agencies.' He turned away, like this was an irrelevance. 'And then, when "Father Ellis" began to make waves on the Welsh border, I came down to take a look for myself. Fell rather in love with the place.'

Bain then talked of how the archaeological excavation was under way at the time, just across the brook from the church; how the immense importance of the site as a place of ancient worship was becoming apparent. 'One of the archaeologists told me he'd dearly love to know what lay under that church. Circular churchyard, pre-Christian site. I took a walk over there myself, and met some eagle-eyed old boy who told me he'd just bought it.'

'Major Wilshire,' Robin said. He couldn't believe how this was shaping up.

'Something like that. I didn't pay too much attention to him, as I was being knocked sideways by the ambience. It was while I was talking to this guy that I had... the vision, I suppose. A moment beyond inspiration, when past and future collided in the present. Boom. I became aware how wonderful and apt it would be if the power of this place could be channelled. If this church was to become a temple again.'

'Under the very nose of your fundamentalist Christian brother,' Betty said quietly.

'In fact' Bain raised his voice, irritated 'it was rather the other way round. For the first time I was almost grateful to Simon, for bringing me here. Ironic, really. But the church had now been sold, and that was that. I went home to London. You can imagine my reaction when, just a few months later, I learned that St Michael's Farm and Old Hindwell Church were on the market again.'

'No,' Betty said coldly. 'What exactly was your reaction?'

'Betty,' said Max, 'I really don't think we should prejudge this.'

Ned said, 'Simply that I wanted it to be bought by someone sympathetic to the pagan cause.'

Bulbs finally started flashing big time inside Robin's head.

The actual tomb was bigger than Merrily had expected: perhaps seven feet long, close to three feet wide, more than three feet deep. From outside, with the funeral party of Prossers, Dr Coll and Nick Ellis grouped around it, it had resembled a stone horse trough. Now, under the cream light from the wrought-iron electric lanterns hanging above the head and the foot of the tomb, she could see that it was far more ornate. A complex design of linked crosses had been carved out of the side panels. The lid was not stone, but perhaps as good as: an oak slab four inches thick. The great tomb had been concreted into its stone plinth.

'All local stone,' Judith said proudly. 'From the quarry.'

'Got that done quickly, didn't he?'

Judith closed the oak door, so their voices were sharpened by the walls of the mausoleum, which were solid concrete, inches thick. The chamber was about twenty feet square, nothing in it but the tomb, and the two of them, and dead Menna.

Judith said, 'Mal Walters, the monumental mason, is a long-established client of J.W. Mal worked through the night.'

'Right.'

Judith Prosser stood by the head of the tomb, disquietingly priest-like in her tubular black quilted coat not quite cassock-length, but close. Her short, strong hair had been bleached, her pewter-coloured earrings were thin, metal pyramids. She was waiting, behind the shade of a sardonic smile.

'I thought...' Merrily put down the airline bag she'd brought from the car. The junior exorcist's starter kit. 'I thought I'd keep it simple.'

But should she even be doing it here, rather than in that big room behind the bay window, where the 'baptism' had taken place?

Yes, she should. She didn't want the complication of having to try to restore peace to a room where the atmosphere had apparently been ravaged by another priest. Also, she had been asked by Menna's next of kin to calm the spirit. No one had invited her to deal with that room, least of all Weal. She didn't want to go in there, didn't want to enter his actual house in his absence. She really needed guidance. If she'd predicted this situation might develop, she'd have rung her spiritual adviser, Huw Owen, in advance. But there'd been no time for that.

Judith moved to a double switch on the wall, and the lantern at the head of the tomb went out, leaving Menna's concrete cell softly lit, like a drawing room.

'Are you a Christian, Mrs Prosser?'

'That's a funny question.'

'I know you go to church. I know you support Father Ellis. I don't really know what you believe.'

'Nor will you ever,' Judith said tartly. 'What's your point? What are you getting at?'

'Do you believe in the unquiet dead?'

Judith Prosser regarded Merrily across the tomb, her eyes half closed. 'The dead are always quiet, Mrs Watkins. The dead are dead, and only the weak-minded are afraid of them. They cannot touch us. Nor, I assume...' She laid a forefinger gently on Menna's small inscription, '... can we touch them.'

'Meaning Mr Weal.'

'Mr Weal's a tragic figure, isn't it? He wanted what he thought Menna was. He liked it that she was quiet. He liked it that she was polite to her father and did not go with boys. A real, three-dimensional woman was far too complicated for J.W. He wanted, I suppose, a shadow of a woman.'

Oh my God.

Merrily said, 'You have to tell me this. If not you yourself, then has anyone else seen the... spirit of Menna Weal?'

Judith made a scornful pfft noise. She half turned and began to unbutton her coat. 'Anyway...' Sweeping the coat back to place her hands on her hips, turning to face Merrily. 'Time is getting on. What do you propose to do here, my girl?'

'Well... I'm going to say some prayers. What I really should be doing I mean to be halfway sure of this is holding a Requiem Eucharist. And for that there really ought to be a few of us. Like I said this morning, it would be better if we'd had Mr Weal with us. I mean with us.'

'And as I said, that would be imposs-'

'Or even Barbara. If Barbara were here, it-'

Merrily heard her own words rebound from the concrete walls. She lurched away from the tomb, as if it were mined.

Such a vast tomb for one small body.

Judith looked mildly curious. 'Someone walk over your grave, Mrs Watkins?'

Merrily knew she'd gone pale. 'Judith...?'

'Go ahead,' said Mrs Prosser. 'We're quite alone, almost.'

Merrily swallowed. The scarf felt tight around her throat.

'What do you think J.W. Weal would have done if he'd discovered that Barbara Buckingham had found out about Father Ellis's exorcism of Menna, performed at his behest?'

Judith's eyes were not laughing. 'What on earth am I supposed to say to that?' She stepped back.

Now they were both looking at the tomb.

'Oh, I see,' Judith said.

Merrily said nothing.

'You mean, after he dumped the car in the Claerwen Reservoir, what, precisely, did he do with the body?'

Merrily said nothing.

'Does Barbara perhaps lie below her poor sister? Were her remains, in those fine English clothes, already set in concrete when Menna's coffin was laid to... unrest?'

Merrily bit her lip.

'Come on, woman! Is that what you meant?'

'It looks very deep,' Merrily said. 'And... as you said, the monumental mason worked all night.'

'All right!' Judith's voice rang with challenge. 'Then let's find out, shall we?'

Merrily found she'd backed against the door.

'Oh, Mrs Watkins, did you think poor J.W. could bring himself to say such a final farewell to his beloved? What other reason would a man like him have for going to all this trouble?' She pointed.