See, most of the ordinary Welsh people she'd met, Jane liked. This might seem like generalized and simplistic, but they seemed kind of classless, no side to them. Contrary to what everybody said, you could have a laugh with them. Look at Gomer Parry.

Look at Eirion, for that matter: chunky, honest, self-deprecating... and this incredible smile that was (as she'd written in a poem she was never going to show him in a million years) like all the birds starting to sing at once on a soft spring morning.

The poor sod. Raised among the crachach.

This was what they were called a the Welsh aristocracy, the top families. A few of them had titles, but most of them were contemptuous of English honours, although a being sharp business people a they were usually incredibly polite to the English people they encountered.

Eirion said his dad, Dafydd Sion Lewis, was some kind of Welsh quango king. He 'served' on the Welsh Development Agency, the Welsh Arts Council, the Wales Tourist Board, the Broadcasting Council for Wales. And he was a major executive shareholder in whatever Welsh Water and Welsh Electricity were calling themselves this week. There was a bunch of them like his dad, Eirion said. The names of the organizations and businesses might change but it was always the same people in control.

Dafydd Sion Lewis was plump and beaming and hearty and, according to Eirion in his darker moments, majorly corrupt.

Gwennan was his second wife, about fifteen years younger. She was a former secondary-school teacher of the Welsh language and now a as a result of being married to the quango king a a key member of the Welsh Language Board, which existed to keep the native tongue alive and thriving.

Not that Jane had a problem with this. She was all for having more languages around: Gaelic, Cornish... anything to keep people different from each other, to create a sense of otherness.

At first, she'd thought that Gwennan, with her two cars and her movie-star wardrobe, was a fairly cool person.

It had taken only one day of the holiday for her to realize what Eirion had already kind of implied: that everything had gone to Gwennan's head a the wealth, the status, the establishment of the Welsh Assembly. She was now a warrior queen of the New Wales, wielding the language like a spear.

'Except it isn't a new Wales at all,' Eirion had said morosely. 'It's the same old place, run by the same old iffy councillors, except they're now known as Assembly Members, supported by the same old bent financiers, but with this new sense of superiority. Suddenly, they're looking down on everybody...'

'Especially the English?' Jane had suggested.

'Especially the English because the English don't have Wales's unique identity.'

Actually, Eirion said, most of the time he found Gwennan quite amusing. She was essentially superficial and quite naive. And she could be very kind sometimes. When she noticed you.

Unfortunately, Gwennan had come with baggage: Sioned and Lowri, eleven and eight, the little princesses. Bilingual through and through. Pocket evangelists for the language and the culture.

'No, Jane,' Sioned would say, wagging her little forefinger until Jane wanted to snap it off. 'I've told you and told you, I'm not doing it unless you ask me yn Cymreig.'

'You know what I'm really doing here, don't you?' Jane said to Eirion when Sioned had gone, presumably to wait for her mother and Dafydd to return to receive the shocking facts. (Was there such a verb as shaggio? They seemed to have converted every other English term coined since about 1750.) 'You know what I am?'

'If she says anything, we'll just simply tell her you were joking,' Eirion said uncomfortably. 'Kind of a risque joke to make to an eleven-year-old, mind, but...'

'I'm the first English au pair in Wales, that's what I am. Do you realize that?'

Behind the door in the farmhouse kitchen Gwennan had hung an appointments calendar. Every day this week displayed a lunch date for her and Dafydd. Every evening they went out for dinner in St David's or Haverfordwest, because several of their friends also had cottages in the area. Because the Pembrokeshire coast was becoming like some kind of Welsh Tuscany.

And who had to look after the bloody kids, meanwhile?

'It's exactly like being an au pair,' Jane said with acidic triumph, 'because I work my butt off for the privilege of learning the fucking language!'

She began to beat the pillow with her fists.

'I'm sorry!' Eirion almost sobbed. 'I genuinely didn't realize she'd be quite so...'

'Opportunistic?'

Eirion was too honest to reply.

It was a big old farmhouse. The first floor had been divided into two sections. There was a separate staircase to Dafydd and Gwennan's suite; the other staircase led to three small bedrooms: Sioned, Lowri... and Jane in the middle. Most nights the kids fell asleep with their respective boom-boxes still pumping Welsh-language rock through the plasterboard walls either side of Jane's bed.

Come to think of it, Gwennan and Dafydd were unlikely to be at all put out by the thought of the young master giving one to the English au pair.

Not that he had, yet. The daily and nightly presence of the evil little stepsisters seemed to be intimidating him more than whoever had been his school's version of Charles Manson.

Stepfamilies: a nightmare.

She'd made the kids' supper. She'd made them tidy their rooms. She'd made them go to bed at ten p.m. She'd made them go back to bed at ten-fifteen. And in the course of this endlessly crappy evening, she'd been grilled by Mum over the phone and made to feel like shit. At eleven-thirty, probably looking like some totally knackered housewife, she'd followed Eirion up to his attic bedroom and collapsed, fully clothed, onto his bed and poured it all out.

'Let's go over it again,' Eirion said. 'This Layla and this...'

'Kirsty.' Jane moved closer to him, which wasn't difficult on a single bed.

'... Find that by staging little seances, or whatever you want to call them, they can wield enormous power over certain kids.'

'It's addictive, I reckon. You keep going back, even though you're terrified. I mean, I'm not terrified a OK, maybe a little scared a but I'm, like, somebody who's attracted to all this stuff anyway. As you know.'

'Yeah,' Eirion said grimly.

'But this is a buttoned-up kid from some fiercely Christian household, who's been taught that spiritualism is, like, firmly in the devil's domain, and her immortal soul is at risk a and she still keeps going back because something about it has... grabbed her.' Jane gripped what she thought was going to be Eirion's arm but turned out to be his thigh. 'Sorry.'

'Go... go on.'

'Kid knows she's like doomed. She's totally beyond the pale. I mean, I've listened behind the door when Mum's been counselling individual parishioners a which is, like, her version of confession. You get some people who are really, really scared that they've thrown it all away because of some really piffling sin.'

'Gets blown up out of all proportion.' Eirion tentatively slid an arm under her waist.

'You'd think it was only a Catholic thing, or hellfire Nonconformism or something, but I don't think it's anything to do with what denomination you are, or even what religion. It's a psychological condition. A kind of dependency. A terrible fear of getting on the wrong side of God. I mean... no wonder she threw up in church. Holy Communion? The Eucharist? You're kneeling there with a mouthful of the blood of Christ, knowing you've as good as sold your soul to the other guy? It's all gonna come down on you in a big way, isn't it?'

'Layla would have known about this girl's background?'

'Oh yeah, Riddock knew exactly what she was doing. Must have been giving her a major buzz, a cruelty high. But you can't help wondering how shocked she was when it really started to happen. When this Justine started coming through and turned out to be Amy's real mother.'

'Would heighten the power trip no end.'

'Mind-blowing. She wouldn't want to let Amy go after that.'

Eirion pushed a hand through her hair. 'You've got this pretty well sussed, haven't you, Jane?'

'I don't know. It's all guesswork, isn't it?'

'You tell your mum all this?'

'Not the theoretical stuff. But she'll have worked that out for herself by now. She's not thick.'

Eirion drew her to him, the length of his body the length of hers, toe to toe, faces almost touching. 'You haven't told me how it ended.'

Jane closed her eyes, saw the circle of letters, the glass with a mind of its own.

J-U-S-T-I-N-E.

'How it ended? We got raided, didn't we? Pretty ludicrous. The shed door just like crashed open and they burst in. The drug squad a the deputy head and the caretaker. All very dramatic. "Nobody move! Hands on the table!" Like one of us might pull a gun. Of course they didn't expect it would be so dark. Layla just blew out the candles, and it was probably Kirsty gathered up the letter-cards. I don't know where she put them a down her front, I expect; they certainly weren't there by the time the caretaker found the lights. The glass was knocked off the table and smashed. It was just a glass. They were expecting... I don't know a Es or worse.'

'They search you?'

'Nah. Layla had her cigs out by then. Plain old Rothmans scattered across the table, like she was sharing them out. Smart bitch. You could see the relief on the deputy head's face, now it was clearly no longer a police matter. "Now, girls, because it's the end of the term, apart from confiscating these disgusting things, I'm not going to take this any further. However..." '

'That was smart of her.'

'Yeah.'

'What will she do now, your mum? Go and tell the girl's parents, try and patch things up?'

'Dunno.'

'Or go after this Layla?'

'Yeah,' Jane said soberly. 'I'm afraid that's exactly what she's going to do a having not the slightest idea of just how massively evil that bitch can be. And if I try to warn her, it'll look like there's something else I don't want her to find out. I... I'm like... feeling pretty pissed-off, Irene. On every front.'

He kissed her gently on the lips.

'OK,' Jane said, 'except maybe that one?'

She put a hand behind his head, opened her mouth to his tongue and moulded her body into his. One of Eirion's hands seemed to be trapped against her left breast.

Jane was feeling less and less like a knackered housewife when they heard the doors of Dafydd Lewis's new Jaguar slamming down in the yard, then laughter. And then something about Eirion, the great lover, Mr Experience, began to kind of shrink.

Soon afterwards, Jane crept back to her own room and lay glowering at the ceiling. She'd been set up; she'd been framed; she'd been used to damage her own mother. She couldn't live with this.

16.

Mafia

LOL GENTLY SHOOK the hand of the vicar's wife.

'I won't get up,' she said.

Simon St John said, 'You might think she says that every time.'

'Just go and get me a drink, you bugger.' Isabel's accent was Valleys Welsh. She was plump and had light brown hair, with tufts of gold, and warm eyes. 'No hurry. Give me time to get to know this boy.'

'I'll get these,' Lol offered.

Isabel glared at him. 'Sit down, you!'

Simon headed for the bar, still in plain clothes a the jeans, the crumpled collarless shirt. Vicar's night off. It was gone nine p.m., the Hop Devil three-quarters full. Lol sat down.

Isabel's black top was low-cut and glittery. Over one shoulder strap and a handle of the wheelchair, he caught a glimpse of Gerard Stock, sitting in the shadow of the bellying chimney breast. So the landlord had let him back in.

Stock was on his own, except for a pint of Guinness and a big whisky. He was leaning back against the wooden settle, with an empty smile and an arm extended along the top of the back rest like he was claiming an invisible girlfriend. Lol thought suddenly of the Lady of the Bines and felt uneasy for a moment.

'You a Catholic, Lol?' Isabel inquired loudly. 'Only I've decided it's time I went to Lourdes, but you've gotta go with a Catholic, isn't it, or it doesn't work.'

'Is that true?'

'What?'

'That you need to be accompanied by a Catholic?'

'Well, he won't take me, anyway. And his lot's rubbish at healing.' Isabel pouted. Then she laughed. 'I fell off a high wall, Lol, is what it was. A long time ago. So, that gets that out of the way. Now a what's a nice-looking boy like you doing all on his own?'

Simon had said he and his wife had made a practice of going to the pub on Monday nights, making it known that this was when the parishioners could get to them without making an official visit out of it a and therefore when delicate issues could be raised informally.

He'd asked Lol to join them, explaining that Isabel liked to meet new people; she didn't get out much.

So Lol had back-burnered his usual reservations about country pubs. Tonight, he felt he owed Simon several drinks. The first analogue recording they'd made of the River Frome song a Lol humming the bits where the lyrics were incomplete a had been so much stronger, more atmospheric, more ethereal than the demo playing in his head. And this was all down to the cello, of course. The cello a dark, low-lying, sinuous a had become the spirit of the Frome.

Simon had sat there, listening to the playback with his arms folded, wincing at the cello parts and then remarking shrewdly, 'Somehow, you can't settle anywhere, can you, Lol? You're the kind of guy who really needs a proper home, but you don't know where it's safe for you to be.'

'Huh?'

'Rejected by the born-again parents, shafted by the shrinks, dumped by the girlfriend in Ledwardine. You want to trust, but you're scared to trust people. And then you fetch up here, and the first thing you latch on to is a sad little river.'

'Very perceptive of you, vicar,' Lol told him. 'But I've learned how to psych myself now, thanks.'

Isabel leaned her head close enough for Lol to smell her shampoo. 'Expecting trouble, he is,' she murmured.

'Simon?' Lol wiped condensation from his glasses.

'Needs you for back-up,' Isabel confided.