A big girl with a mature, not to say ripe figure, a mass of dark brown curly hair still slick from the pool. She had smoky brown eyes under heavy brows. She was seventeen going on thirty-eight, and darkly radiant. And she was here.

She was here.

As in, not in the Black Country with Amy Shelbone.

'Layla, love,' Allan Henry said. 'Excuse me, but these ladies would like to know if you have much regular contact with the dead.'

Layla Riddock backed away, mock-startled, wrapping her kimono and her arms around her.

'We talking about necrophilia?' She cocked her head. 'Necrophilia's useless for women, isn't it? I mean, rigor mortis doesn't last, right?'

Allan Henry laughed again, for the first time in several minutes, as if a little light had come back into his life.

'No, actually, Layla,' he said, 'this could be very serious. For somebody. This is Mrs Hill and Mrs Watkins. Mrs Watkins is a minister of the Church of England, and it seems one of her parishioners, a young girl from your school, has attempted to take her own life.'

Layla nodded casually. 'Amy Shelbone.'

'Oh...' he said. 'You know about this, do you?'

Merrily was watching him closely now. She saw nothing. No obvious reaction from Henry to the name Shelbone. And there really should have been, shouldn't there?

'Sad,' Layla said. 'But horribly predictable, I'm afraid. That's one disturbed little girl.'

'Really.' Allan Henry looked at Merrily and Sophie in turn, triumph in his eyes, then back at his stepdaughter. 'Layla, would you tell us about this?'

'About what?'

'About any previous dealings you might have had with this young child. Please?'

Layla shrugged. 'Not much to tell. I've never made any secret about my bloodline, and so I'm always getting approached by kids who want their palms read, or their cards, or something. Anyway, one day a a few weeks ago, I suppose a up comes this rather solemn little girl, says would I help her contact her mother, for heaven's sake. Her mother is, you know... dead.'

'She approached you, did she, this little girl?'

'Oh yeah. Very politely. I told her not to be silly. I told her that whatever she may have heard about the Rom, we have great respect for the dead but we don't get involved with them on a personal level. I said a you know a like, run along.'

'And that was the last you heard?'

Layla sighed, wrapped her kimono tighter in frustration. 'Wish I could say it was. Next thing I hear that some other students a principally a girl called Kirsty Ryan a have taken Amy under their wing and they're holding these kind of seance things, what d'you call them a where you lay out letters in a circle and have a glass upside down?

Merrily said nothing.

'Anyway, I thought I'd better check it out. There's a lot of this stuff about the school lately a little witchcrafty groups popping up. Awfully childish. I don't like to see kids playing at it. If you have psychic skills, it's your responsibility to develop them sensibly. If you haven't got it... don't mess with it. So, yeah, I found them in this shed on one of the fields and I...' Layla paused and smiled. 'I'm afraid I arranged a little surprise.'

Layla glanced around. Holding court, now. A dominant kind of girl, Robert Morrell had said. Perhaps the kind of girl where all the teaching staff, both sexes, would be relieved when she left school.

It was hard to believe this woman was only about a year older than Jane.

It was also hard to believe she'd want to waste time on a little girl like Amy Shelbone.

'What did you do, Layla?' Allan Henry was taking a back seat, playing the feed, the straight man a and proud to do it, Merrily thought.

Which was interesting in itself.

'I grassed them up,' Layla said smugly. 'I discreetly tipped off one of the staff. And there was a raid.'

'Caught them at it?' Allan Henry said.

Layla put up both her hands. 'Absolutely nothing to do with me!' She wore five rings, all gold.

Everyone was quiet. It was not so difficult to believe that Layla Riddock would consider her natural peers to be found among the staff rather than the pupils.

Allan Henry glanced at Merrily and Sophie in turn again. He was smiling gently.

Very mature for her age.

'Good for you,' Merrily said hoarsely to Layla, and the schoolgirl smiled at her, too, the tip of her tongue childishly touching a corner of her mouth. But her eyes were cold with malice. Merrily felt sure it was malice.

You can't touch us, the smile said. You can't get near us.

Neither of them said a word until they were in the lane, heading back towards Canon Pyon. Merrily was expecting a hard time. Stay away, Sophie had advised back in the office. What would be the point? And then, in the car, If I were you, I wouldn't get out.

When had Sophie ever not been right?

She was looking at her most severe, sitting stiffly, eyes on the road, both hands positioned precisely on the wheel, like she was taking her driving test. Merrily sat with her bag on her knees, a hand inside playing with the cigarettes. She couldn't keep the hand still.

'I'm sorry, Sophie.'

Sophie said nothing, but you could almost hear her thoughts ricocheting like pellets from the upholstery and the windscreen and the dash.

'It was a very bad idea,' Merrily said. 'I should not have dragged you into it.' She'd crushed a cigarette, strands of tobacco teased between fingers and thumb. 'I don't know how he'll get back at us, but he will. I was useless in there. I let him walk all over us. A corrupt developer, a crook, and I let him... let them both walk all over us.'

Sophie turned right, towards Hereford, and the car speeded up. A mile or so along the road, she said mildly, 'They're an item, aren't they, those two?'

The sky was flawless, the blue deepening. Across the edge of the city, you could see all the way to the hooked nose of The Skirrid, the holy mountain above Abergavenny.

Merrily closed her bag on the tobacco mess. 'I'm glad you said it first.'

'Is Sandra really away on a cruise, I wonder?'

'Maybe she's buried in the garden. He can do anything, can't he? He's got everybody in his pocket, and now he's sleeping with his stepdaughter!' Merrily was momentarily horrified at how high her voice had risen.

'He might sail close to the wind,' Sophie said, 'but he's not stupid. I expect Sandra is on a cruise. Quite a long cruise.'

'So you think she knows?'

'Wouldn't you?'

'I wonder how long it's been going on.'

'A more interesting question is, which of them initiated it?' Sophie said.

A very lucky man, Charlie Howe had observed. Things've fallen his way.

And people have fallen out of his way.

Sophie said, 'The girl was lying rather cleverly, wasn't she?'

'Beautifully. Forget about the trinkets, that's probably the best evidence of genuine Romany ancestry.'

'I'm sorry?'

'They're supposed to consider it an art form.'

'Lying?'

'Mmm.'

'And what else do you know about them?'

'Not enough. Not yet, anyway.'

'Well, forget about it for tonight,' Sophie said. 'Get a good night's sleep. If Inspector Howe or anyone else rings wanting to speak to you, I'll put them off.'

'No, put them through.'

'You're getting personally involved. That's not helpful to anyone.'

'I am personally involved. And now there's a child missing.'

Only two, three years between Amy Shelbone and Layla Riddock, but one was a child and one was a woman. Merrily folded her hands in her lap, couldn't keep them still. A teenage girl had done this to her. She closed her eyes, breathed in.

'Sophie,' she said. 'Could I possibly have a cigarette?'

34.

The Cure of Souls

'HA,' HE SAID. 'The drukerimaskri.'

He seemed to be dancing in the last of the dusk, will-o'-thewispish. The late evening was rich and close, the atmosphere laden with herbal scents. There was going to be a full moon.

Merrily said, 'Drukeri-?'

'-maskri. It's a Romany term.' Al Boswell's white hair flurried as he did a little bow. She suspected he was mocking her.

A lantern hung from the bowed roof of the vardo, a thick candle inside it. On the grass in front of the wagon, a heavy wooden table was set up, with bentwood chairs. A shaggy donkey browsed nearby. In the distance, beyond the building housing the hop museum, glittered the tiered lights of Malvern.

Al Boswell presented himself in front of Lol, hands behind his back. 'Where's your guitar? Why didn't you bring your guitar? We could have played for the moon.'

Lol told him Prof had insisted the guitar was a short-term loan. 'Besides, it didn't seem-'

'Appropriate?' Al Boswell arched his back like a thin, white cat. 'Relevant? Seemly?'

'All those,' Lol said. 'Plus-'

'You can't surely be afraid to play alongside an old man whose arthriticky fingers slur drunkenly over the frets?'

'Tonight, I can manage without total humiliation,' Lol admitted.

'Certainly not in the presence of the lovely drukerimaskri.'

I am not going to ask what it means, Merrily thought.

'Or are you afraid the drukerimaskri would think it was wrong to play for the moon? And besides, look at her: she's in a hurry, there's no time, she's on hot bricks, she needs the information. Therefore, she might find you... trivial.' Al Boswell walked right up to Lol, peered into his eyes. 'And that would never do.'

'Al, for God's sake!' The beautiful, frail silvery woman in the long skirt came down the steps of the wagon, carrying a tray with glasses on it. 'He's such a terrible walking cliche sometimes,' she said to Merrily. 'Except, of course, in the presence of other Romanies, on which rare occasions he's almost withdrawn.'

'She's such a bitch tonight!' Al Boswell howled. He took Lol on one side. 'So, have you heard from Levin?'

The donkey had ambled up to Merrily and she ran her fingers through his heavy fur and gazed into his billiard-ball eyes. There was an unreality about the night or perhaps a hyper-reality a a sensual intensity she hadn't been prepared for. Lol had brought her here, and suddenly she wanted Lol to take her away again; she wanted to be alone with him. Things needed to be said, worked out, if that were possible.

'You're terribly tense, aren't you?' Mrs Boswell was standing next to her. 'And exhausted? I'm going to fetch you something that might help.'

'No, honestly, it's...' Merrily let the donkey nibble at the sleeve of her jacket. 'What's his name?'

'Stanley.'

'Does that mean something in Romany?'

'I do hope not.'

Merrily smiled. A wave of tiredness washed over her, and the lights of Malvern blurred.

'About Stock.' Mrs Boswell looked insubstantial in the dusk a like steam, like a ghost. But for the glasses on a chain, you felt you could have put a hand through her. 'There's nothing you could have done. It shouldn't have been allowed to happen, but there's nothing you could have done. You weren't to know.'

'Know what?'