Despite Livenight, Jane still always thought of them as dark-haired, dark-complexioned. Celtic. But this was an English rose, and a wild rose at that. She had a subdued energy about her. Or maybe that was just a subjective thing, because, thanks to Gomer, Jane knew.

Wow!

'This is Betty,' Mum had said casually. 'She's staying the night. This is my daughter, Jane. Brew some tea, flower. We'll be down in a few minutes.'

Under normal circumstances, this would have been an ultra-cool moment, a significant chapter in the liberalization of the Anglican Church.

But the chances that the Thorogood woman was not involved with Ned Bain were pretty remote. Pagans stuck together, so clearly Mum could have invited in more than she knew.

'We keep a room fairly ready,' she was saying. 'It's not very grand, but the bedding should be aired.'

'Anything, please,' Betty Thorogood said.

Jane forgot about the tea, followed them upstairs. The blonde, it had to be admitted, did not look like a threat. Instead she looked done in. By now, most people who'd never been here before would be commenting on the atmosphere and the obvious antiquity of the place the twisting black beams, the bulging walls, the tilted ceilings. This woman might have been climbing the stairwell of a concrete apartment block.

Mum said, 'If you need a change of clothes I'm sure we can sort something out. I'm a bit on the stunted side, but Jane's got a lot of stuff from the days when you were supposed to buy everything a couple of sizes too big.'

The self-styled witch and Mum were standing on the landing, near the second staircase leading to Jane's apartment. 'Bathroom's that one.' Mum indicated the one door that was slightly ajar. 'It's bleak and cold and horrible, but one day, when we get the money...' She broke off.

From six stairs down, Jane witnessed this clearly. Betty Thorogood quivered for just an instant before tossing back her mass of hair and, almost absently, shaking out a word.

'Apples?'

Mum froze; Jane saw her eyes grow watchful.

Mum said, 'I'm sorry?' As though she hadn't heard, which of course she had.

She and Jane both had. And they knew what it meant. For a moment, the air up here seemed almost too thick to breathe.

'I'm sorry,' Betty said. 'I just... you know... Sorry.'

Jane marched up four steps. 'You had a feeling of apples?'

Mum frowned. 'Jane...'

'What kind of apples?'

'I...' Betty shook her head again, as if to clear it, her hair tumbling. 'I suppose not apples as much as blossom. White, like soft snow.'

'Oh, wow,' Jane breathed.

'I'm sorry,' Betty said. 'It just came out.'

Mum bit her lip.

Jane said, 'And we thought Wil had gone...'

Mum started flinging lights on. 'Betty, if you want to just check out your room...'

Betty Thorogood nodded and followed her.

She wasn't getting away that easily.

'Wil was our ghost,' Jane called after them. 'Wil Williams, vicar of this parish. Found dead in the orchard behind the church in sixteen seventy. Hanging from an apple tree when the blossom was out.'

'I'm sorry,' Betty Thorogood said again. 'It's a problem I have.'

'Wow,' Jane said, in serious awe. Nobody knew about the apple blossom. Not even Kali Three. 'You're the real thing, aren't you?'

39.

Witches Don't Cry THE KID BROUGHT them tea at the kitchen table and then started filling the kitchen with the seductive scent of toast. It was ten-thirty. As far as Jane was concerned, Betty Thorogood had proved herself.

Merrily had stopped agonizing about this stuff. Where sensitives were concerned, seeking the cold, earthly, rational explanation could be wastefully time-consuming. Life was too short to question it too hard; it just was. It would have been less impressive in Betty's case if she hadn't, in other respects, appeared defeated, demoralized, broken. As though she'd looked into her own future and seen black water.

'Is Wil still here?' demanded Jane, galvanized knowing nothing about the death of the elderly woman, Mrs Wilshire. 'I mean as a spirit, not just an imprint?'

'I don't know,' Betty said. 'Sometimes it's hard to qualify what I feel. I just get images sometimes. Fragments, incomplete messages.'

The apple blossom. Last year, when they'd first moved in, Merrily had been sensing an old distress locked into the upper storeys of the vicarage, the timeless dementia of trapped emotions. Jane, under the influence of Miss Lucy Devenish, folklorist and mystic, claimed to have actually smelled the blossom, felt it on her face like warm snow.

It was this undismissable haunting and the Church's general disinterest which had prodded Merrily in the general direction of Deliverance. There needed to be someone around to reassure people that they weren't necessarily losing their minds.

Jane was saying, 'Were you like sensitive before you became a witch?'

Betty looked uncomfortable. 'It's why I became one. If you exclude spiritualism, Wicca's one of the few refuges for people who are... that way. My parents are C of E, which doesn't encourage that kind of thing.'

An apologetic glance at Merrily, who also caught a triumphant glance from Jane, little cow, before she went greedily back into the interrogation. 'But, like, who do you actually worship?'

'That's probably the wrong word. We recognize the male and female principles, and they can take several forms. Most of it comes down to fertility, in the widest sense we don't need more people in the world, but we do need expanded consciousness.'

'And you, like, draw down the moon?' The kid showing off her knowledge of witch jargon. 'Invoke the goddess into yourself?'

'Kind of.'

Betty was reticent, solemn in the subdued light of the big, cream-walled kitchen. Maybe having a vicar in the same room was an inhibiting factor, but this woman was certainly not Livenight material. Merrily sat down at the table and listened as Betty, pressured by Jane, began explaining how she'd actually got into Wicca at teacher training college, before dropping out to work for a herbalist. How she'd saved up to go with a friend to an international pagan conference in New England, where she met the American, Robin Thorogood, making a film with some old art school friends. So Robin had found Betty first, and then Wicca, in that order. Betty's face momentarily shone at the memory. Her green eyes were clear as rock pools: she must literally have bewitched Robin Thorogood.

The phone rang. Jane dropped the cheese grater and carried the cordless into a corner.

'You have a disciple,' Merrily said softly.

'Kids only find Wicca exotic because it's forbidden. When it becomes a regular part of religious education they'll find it just as boring as... anything else.'

'Don't feel you have to talk it down on my account.'

'Merrily' Betty pushed back her hair 'there doesn't need to be conflict. There's actually a lot of common ground. Spiritual people of any kind have more in common than they do with total non-believers. In the end we want the same things, most of us. Don't we?'

'Maybe.'

Jane said loudly, 'No, I'm sorry, she's not here. I was kind of expecting her back, but in her job you can't count on anything. Sometimes she spends, like, whole nights battling with crazed demonic entities and then she comes home and sleeps for two days. It's like she's in a coma really disturbing. Sure, no problem. Bye.'

'Flower,' Merrily said, 'you do realize that little exercise in whimsy might be lost in the transition to cold print.'

'In the Independent?'

Merrily nodded. 'So just don't say it to the Daily Star.'

She went over to switch on the answering machine. When she came back Betty was saying, 'In Shrewsbury, we were members of a coven containing quite a few... pagan activists, I suppose you'd have to call them. Teachers, mainly. They're good people in their way, but they'd be more use on the council. They're looking for organized religion, for structure.'

'These are the people who've moved in on your house?' Merrily asked her.

'Some of them. It's what I wanted to come down here and get away from. You don't have to work in a coven. The only structures I'm really interested in now are the ones you build for yourself. But Robin will go along with anybody, I'm afraid.'

'Why don't you phone him?'

'I will. I just don't want to speak to any of the others. We came down here to work alone. At least, I did. Robin just wanted to live somewhere inspiring and to show it off to his friends. He'd tell you we were sent here because of a series of omens. All that was irrelevant to me.'

Interesting. What was slowly becoming apparent to Merrily was that Betty had come to Old Hindwell in a state of personal spiritual crisis. She'd been drawn into witchcraft by the need to understand the psychic experiences she'd been having from an early age. But maybe paganism hadn't come up with the answers she'd sought.

'Omens?' Merrily brought out her cigarettes. To Jane's evident disgust, Betty accepted one.

'Estate agent particulars arriving out of the blue, that kind of thing. When Robin saw the church, he was hooked. Just like Major Wilshire.'

'Tell me about Mrs Wilshire again,' Merrily said.

The police had questioned Betty for almost an hour at Mrs Wilshire's bungalow. A detective constable had arrived who probably had never had a suspicious death to himself before.

'I'd no idea she suffered angina,' Betty had told them. 'I just concocted something harmless for her arthritis.'

No, she could not imagine why Mrs Wilshire would stop taking the Trinitrin tablets prescribed for her angina, a full, unopened bottle of which had been discovered by Dr Banks-Morgan. No, she would never in a million years have advised Mrs Wilshire to stop taking them. She had only suggested a possible winding-down of the steroids if and when the herbal remedy had any appreciable effects on the arthritis.

'She told me Dr Coll knew all about me, and he was very much in favour of complementary medicines for some complaints.'

'You know that's not true, Mrs Thorogood,' the CID man had said. 'Dr Banks-Morgan says he has no respect at all for alternative medicines and he makes this clear to all his patients.'

It got worse. If Mrs Wilshire was not becoming unduly influenced by Mrs Thorogood and her witch-remedies, why would she tell Dr Banks-Morgan he needn't bother coming to visit her again?

Betty could not believe for one minute that Mrs Wilshire had told her caring, caring GP not to come back. But she knew which of them was going to be believed.

'What a bastard,' Jane said. 'He's trying to fit you up.'

'Where did they leave things?' Merrily said. 'The police, I mean.'

'They said they might be in touch again.'

'They probably won't be. There's nothing they can prove.'

Betty said, 'Do you believe me?'

'Course we do,' Jane said.

'Merrily?'

'From what little I know of Dr Coll, I wouldn't trust him too far. Gomer?'

Gomer thought about it. 'Smarmy little bugger, Dr Coll. Always persuading folk to 'ave tests and things for their own good, like, but it's just so's he can pick up cash from the big drug companies that's what Greta reckons.'

'Then I'll tell you the rest,' Betty said.

And she told them about Mrs Juliet Pottinger and what she'd said about the Hindwell Trust.

'En't never yeard of it,' Gomer said when she'd finished.

Merrily didn't find that too surprising if the trust was administered by J.W. Weal.

'Lot of incomers is retired folk,' Gomer confirmed. 'Like young Greg says, they comes out yere in the summer, thinks how nice it all looks and they're amazed at how low house prices is, compared to where they comes from. So they sells up, buys a crappy ole cottage, moves out yere, gets ill...'

'Fair game?'

'Like poor bloody hand-reared pheasants,' Gomer said.

Merrily asked Betty, 'Is it your feeling Mrs Wilshire's left money to the Hindwell Trust?'

Betty nodded.

'This stinks,' Merrily said.

'Works both ways, see,' said Gomer. 'Patient needs their will sortin', mabbe some poor ole biddy goin' a bit soft in the head, and Dr Coll recommends a good lawyer, local man, trust him with your life. Big Weal turns up, you're some little ole lady, you en't gonner argue too much. 'Sides which, it's easy for a lawyer to tamper with a will, ennit? Get the doctor to witness it. All local people, eh?'

Betty explained why she'd gone to see Mrs Pottinger in the first place. Talking about that particular atmosphere she'd perceived in the old church, but hesitating before finally describing the image of a stricken and desperate man in what might have been a stained cassock.

'Wow,' said Jane.

Merrily tried not to react too obviously, but she was becoming increasingly interested in the Reverend Terence Penney. 'What year was this, again?'

'Seventy-five,' Betty said. 'He seems to have been turning into a latent hippy.'

Gomer looked up. 'Loads o' hippies round yere. You could get an ole cottage, no electric, for a few 'undred, back then, see, and nobody asked no questions. More drugs in Radnor them days than you'd find the whole o' Birmingham.'

'But you never actually ran into Penney yourself?' Merrily lit another cigarette.