'No, let's include that.' Merrily sat down.

Greg said there'd been a full house last night.

'First time in ages. Folks I ain't never seen before. Not big drinkers, but we got frew a lot of Cokes and shandies and if you know anyfing about the licensing trade you'll know that's where the big profit margins lie, so I got no complaints there.'

'Thievin' bugger,' Gomer said. 'So what brought this increase in trade, boy?'

'Wife went to church, Gomer. That funeral. Mrs Weal. Never come back for a good while after you'd left. I mean hours. Said she'd got talking to people. First time she'd really talked to anybody since we come here.' He scowled. 'Including me.'

'She'd never been before?' Merrily said. 'To church to the hall?'

'Nah. Not to any kind of church. See, what you gotta realize about Marianne and I've never told a soul round here, and I would bleedin' hate for anybody-'

'Not a word, boy,' Gomer said. 'Not a word from us.'

'She got problems.' Greg's voice went down to a mutter. 'Depression. Acute depression. Been in hospital for it. You know what I mean psychiatric? This is back in London, when we was managing a pub in Fulham. She was getting... difficult to handle.'

Merrily said nothing.

'Wiv men and... and that.' Greg waved it away with an embarrassed shake of the head. 'Ain't a nympho or noffink like that. It was just the depression. We had a holiday once and she was fine. Said she was sure she'd be fine the whole time if we went to live somewhere nice, like in the country.' He snorted. 'Country ain't cheap no more. Not for a long time.'

''Cept yere, mabbe,' Gomer said.

'Yeah.'

'It's a trap, Greg, boy.'

'Tell me about it. I've had people in here incomers, you can pick 'em out from the nervous laughter still lookin' for strawberries and cream on the village green and the blacksmith taptappin' over his forge. Be funny if it wasn't so bleedin' tragic.'

'That was you, was it?' Merrily said softly. 'When you first came here?'

'Her not me. I ain't a romantic. I tried to tell her... yeah, all right, maybe I did fink it was gonna be different. I mean, there's noffink wrong with the local people, most of 'em...'

'I coulder tole you, boy,' Gomer said. 'You come to the wrong part o' the valley. Folks back there...' he waved a hand over his shoulder, back towards New Radnor. 'They're different again, see. Bit of air back there. Makes a difference.'

'So your wife went to church again yesterday?' Merrily prompted.

'Yeah. Off again. Up the village hall. Couldn't get out this place fast enough. I didn't want this. Sure, I wanted her to make friends, but not this way. I said, come on, we ain't churchgoers and it'd be hypocritical to start now.'

'Without the hypocrites, all our congregations would be sadly depleted,' Merrily admitted. 'But she went anyway. And came back all aglow, right?'

Greg didn't smile.

'Made lots of new instant friends,' Merrily said. 'People she'd only nodded to in the village shop hugged her as she left. She realized she'd never felt quite so much at home in the community before.'

'Dead on,' Greg said sourly.

'And she wants you to close the pub and go to church with her next week.'

'Says it's the only way we're gonna have a future. And I don't fink she meant the extra business. It won't...' He looked scared. 'It won't last, will it, Miss...?'

'Merrily.'

'It can't last. Can it? She's not a religious person. I mean... yeah, I coulda foreseen this, soon as people starting whispering about the new rector, what a wonderful geezer he was, how their lives was changed, how he'd... I dunno, helped them stop smoking, straightened out their kids, this kind of stuff. All this talk of the Holy Spirit, and people fainting in church. And Marianne kind of saying, "Makes you fink, don't it? Never had no luck to speak of since we moved in. Wouldn't do no harm, would it?" ' Greg looked at Merrily's collar. 'Not your style, then, all this Holy Spirit shite?'

'Not my style, exactly...'

Gomer said, 'Don't do any good to let your feet get too far off the ground, my experience.'

'Why did they want you to close the pub today?' Merrily asked.

'Aaah.' Shook his head contemptuously. 'You seen the paper. He told 'em all yesterday this was coming off. Got bloody Devil-worshippers in the village and they gotta be prepared. Bleedin' huge turnout. Standing room only up the hall, 'cording to Marianne, when I could get any sense out of her. People hanging out the doors, lining the bloody steps.'

'This is local people or... newcomers?'

'Mainly newcomers, I reckon. A few locals, though, no question. And apparently Ellis is going...' Greg threw up his arms. ' "There's a great evil come amongst us! We got to fight it. We are the chosen ones in the battle against Satan!" ' Satan is this Robin Thorogood? All right, a Yank, a bit loud in your face. But Satan? You credit that?'

'You know him, then?'

He shrugged. 'Americans. Talk to 'em for half an hour, you know 'em. His wife's more down to earth. I didn't know they was witches, though. They never talked about that. But why should they?'

'You were going to tell us why you'd closed the pub.'

'He don't want any distractions. He wants concentration of faith.'

'I don't understand,' Merrily said. 'Why?'

'Mondays he holds his healing sessions,' Greg said. 'Up the village hall.'

'So?'

There was a lot of pain and bewilderment in his eyes.

'I can help,' Merrily said. 'Just tell me.'

Greg breathed heavily down his nose. 'Last night, she says to me, "I'm unclean." Just like that like out the Bible. "I've been tempted by Satan," she says.'

'En't we all, boy?' Gomer said.

'By Thorogood. Suddenly, she's being frank all the time. She's telling me stuff I don't wanna know. Like she was... tempted sexually by Robin Thorogood, agent of Satan. She was possessed by his "dark glamour". She wanted to sh- sleep wiv him. She comes out wiv all this. To me.'

'Wanted to sleep with him?'

'Ah, noffink bleedin' happened. I'm sure of that. He ain't been here two minutes. Plus she's ten years older than what he is, gotta be, and if you seen his wife... Nah, I doubt he even noticed Marianne. It's just shite.' Greg shook his head, gutted. 'I'll go get your coffee.'

'Greg, hang on... "Possessed by his dark glamour"?' This wasn't his wife speaking, this was Ellis. 'Did she actually use the word "possessed"?'

'I reckon, yeah. To be honest, I couldn't take no more. I was knackered out. I went to bed. This is totally stupid. This don't happen in places like this. This is city madness, innit?'

'And she's up at the hall now?'

Merrily slid from her stool, picked up her scarf.

30.

Handmaiden OUT IN THE pub car park, she was ambushed.

'Mrs Watkins Martyn Kinsey, BBC Wales. I gather you're speaking for the diocese today.'

'Well, I am, but-'

'We'd like to knock off a quick interview, if that's OK.'

He'd probably recognized her from Livenight. She asked him if there was any chance of doing this stuff later. From where she stood she could see the top of the cross on the village hall, and it was lit up, and it hadn't been lit before.

'Actually' Kinsey was a plump, shrewd-eyed guy in his thirties 'if we don't do it now, I suspect we could be overtaken by events. Nick Ellis is over there in the hall, having a meeting with some people. We're expecting him to come out and announce plans for a march to St Michael's Church, probably tonight.'

'That's what he's doing in there, is it?' The cross was lit up for a policy meeting? I don't think so.

'Isn't that going to be too late for your programme?'

'Oh sure much too late. We might get a piece in the half nine slot, though that'll be only about forty seconds. But I think it's going to be a damp squib anyway, with no one there to protest at. The Thorogoods have been smart enough to vacate the premises.'

'You've not been able to speak to them?'

Kinsey shook his head. 'That's why we're going to have to make do if you don't mind me putting it like that with people like you. Just tell us where the Church stands on this issue. A straightforward response. Won't take more than a couple of minutes.'

Of course, it wasn't straightforward. And, with the positioning and the repositioning and the cutaways and the noddies, it took most of twenty minutes. Kinsey asked her if the diocese was fully behind Ellis; Merrily said the diocese was concerned about the situation. So would she be joining in tonight's protest? Not exactly; but she'd be going along as an observer.

'So the diocese is actually sitting on the fence?'

Merrily said, 'Personally, I don't care too much for witch-hunts.'

'So you think that's literally what this is?'

'I just wouldn't like it to turn into one. The Reverend Ellis has a perfect right well, it's his job, in fact to oppose whatever he considers evil, but-'

'Do you think it's evil?'

'I haven't met the Thorogoods. I wouldn't, on face value, condemn paganism any more than I'd condemn Buddhism or Islam. But I would, like everyone else, be interested to find out what they're proposing to do in Old Hindwell Church.'

'You'd see that potentially as sacrilege?'

'The significant point about Old Hindwell Church is that it's no longer a functioning church. It's been decommissioned.'

'What about the graveyard, though? Wouldn't relatives of dead people buried there-'

'There never were all that many graves because the proximity of the brook caused occasional flooding. What graves there were are quite old, and only the stones now remain. Obviously, we're concerned that those stones should not be tampered with.'

'What about the way the village itself has reacted? All the candles in the windows... how do you feel about that?'

Merrily smiled. 'I think they look very pretty.'

'What do you think they're saying?'

'Well... lots of different things, probably. Why don't you knock on a few doors and ask?'

Kinsey lowered his microphone, nodded to the cameraman. It was a wrap. 'Out of interest, Martyn,' Merrily said, 'what did people have to say when you knocked on their doors?'

'Sod all,' said Kinsey. 'Either they didn't answer or they backed off or they politely informed us that Mr Ellis was doing the talking. And in some cases not so politely. Off the record, why is Ellis doing this? Why's he going for these people these so-called pagans?'

'You tell me.'

'I can't. He's not your usual evangelical, all praising God and bonhomie. He's quiet, he chooses his words carefully. Also he gets on with the locals... which is unusual. They're canny round here, not what you'd call impressionable. Anyway, not my problem. You going to be around, if we need anything else?'

'For the duration,' Merrily said.

'Well, good luck.'

'Thanks.'

She ran all the way to the village hall, meeting nobody on the way, bounding up the steps and praying she wasn't too late, because if it was all over... well, hearsay evidence just wasn't the same.

At the top, she stopped for breath and to assess the man in the porch, obviously guarding the closed doors to the hall. Slumped on a folding chair like a sack of cement. He was an unsmiling, flat-capped bloke in his fifties. She didn't recognize him.

He didn't quite look at her. ''Ow're you?'

'I'm fine. OK if I just pop in?'

'No press, thank you. Father Ellis will be out in a while.'

'I'm not press.'

'I still can't let you in.'

Merrily unwound her scarf. He took in the collar, his watery eyes swivelling uncertainly.

'You're with Father Ellis?'

'Every step of the way,' Merrily said shamelessly.