'It's that bloody Boswell guitar,' Prof said. 'I knew it would be cursed.'

'Oh, no,' Lol said quickly. 'No curse. I don't think so. Probably no curse after all.'

No need, surely, for the burning of the Boswell vardo to become any kind of issue a although Al had told Lol that maybe tomorrow, maybe the day after, he would not be over-surprised to wake up in the Lower World with a whole lot of explaining to do. He insisted he was taking nothing for granted; he would be grateful for each fresh day with Sally and the ponies and Stanley the donkey. He was grateful, too, obviously, to the drukerimaskri a if he'd had to borrow a place in which to be found dead, he hadn't particularly wanted to borrow it from Adam Lake.

So, Lol wondered, had he actually encountered Rebekah as he sat in the hop-yard under the midday sun? Had he, in fact, journeyed to the Lower World?

These were not questions that a gaujo had any right to ask, Al had said sternly. But, well, if the little priest had managed to retrieve the Romany soul of poor Rebekah, he would not deny having performed a little essential groundwork.

Al smiled: gypsies lied.

'I've been thinking about you, Lol,' he'd said finally, leaning on the fence around his paddock, watching Stanley browse the buttercups. 'You and this thing about the Frome. This rootlessness, this having no home? As you may have gathered, we Romanies prefer to see this as a benefit a no estates, no cities, no cathedrals.'

'But I'm a gaujo,' Lol pointed out.

'In which case,' Al kept on smiling, 'consider it the first stage in your personal development.'

Walking away, in the sunset, Lol had observed Sally coming down from the museum to meet Al. She wore a long, white dress, embroidered around the bosom, wide and flouncy at the hem, and at least forty years out of fashion.

Prof said, 'The other thing a and I want the truth here, Laurence, no placatory bullshit a has that insane bastard been near the place?'

'Who?'

'Who? Stock, of course! The impossible creep who claims he's being haunted out of his home. If you recall, around the time I was suggesting you should be thinking about producing at least four fresh songs, I also gave express instructions that Stock should not be admitted to the premises while I was gone, yes?'

Lol sighed. 'You don't read the papers much, do you, Prof... when you're working?'

'I don't read the papers at all. I don't read the mail. I don't read menus, either, because when I'm working, with my stomach the way it is these days, I don't even eat. No, I don't read the sodding papers.'

'Evidently not,' Lol agreed.

He moved through the silent studio, where the Boswell guitar, in all her quiet beauty, sat on the stand, where the preliminary a and possibly final a tape of 'The Cure of Souls' still occupied the deck.

After a lot of noise, it was very quiet now.

A thousand questions still echoing; just a few answers.

Gomer Parry had brought Jane and Eirion across to Prof's, and Eirion's dad's secretary had arrived in the BMW a she'd come up to Hereford by train with a spare set of keys to pick up the car from the police station where it had been accommodated overnight. And to collect Eirion. Jane had considered her options for a while before getting in the car with them. 'Can't let the poor dab face this alone.'

This was after the police had been and gone: Frannie Bliss, with DS Mumford. DCI Howe had left, it was presumed, with her father. 'She'll deny any of it happened,' Merrily had said to Lol afterwards, as they waved the kids away to Pembrokshire. 'Especially to herself. She'll have had someone tell the press she was called away on another case, and she'll never talk about it, not even to her dad. And she'll hate me worse than ever. But that's the price you pay.'

Lol said, 'What would have happened to her, if you hadn't-'

Merrily had just shrugged, and Lol had conjured, then dismissed, nebulous images of a hungry, promiscuous Annie Howe darkening into corruption.

Like her old man?

'You think?' Merrily had asked him.

'I don't really know. He went out of his way to tell you about Allan Henry and the corruption he wasn't involved in. I just... don't know.'

'He told me you were going to blackmail him,' Merrily said, 'to keep Annie off my back.'

'You see? He told you that. It doesn't fit with him having something to hide, does it? I bet he does, though.'

'Oh yeah,' Merrily said. 'No doubt at all. Would you have?'

'Blackmailed him? I never even thought of it that way. I've never done anything like that before.' He'd blushed. 'Maybe.'

'I don't deserve it,' Merrily said. 'I don't deserve any of you... Sophie... Jane a don't ever tell her I said that! I just... flounder about from one irrational scenario to another, making a balls of things, coming to false conclusions a appealing to God, apologizing to God... being terrified of coming one day to reject God. I mean, before all this began I was supposed to recruit a back-up team. I don't know where to start. Simon-'

'Forget Simon,' Lol said. 'Like you don't have enough problems.'

'He came through today, though.'

'You don't know what he's like tonight.'

'I do have a situation he could help with. If he'd be willing to talk to someone with the same kind of... sensitivity problem.'

'Amy Shelbone?'

'Either she represses it and it goes on causing trouble. Or she gets advice from the wrong kind of people and becomes something monstrous. She won't get sent to a detention centre, but she might get put into the psychiatric system a and who's that going to help? Not Amy, and certainly not any other patients she comes into contact with.'

'Psychiatric medicine doesn't allow for people like that,' Lol said. 'No use talking to Simon, though. He'll only say he'd screw her up even more. How about I talk to Isabel and she talks to Simon?'

'Would he talk to the Shelbones, too, do you think? As a psychic and a clergyman?'

'But not in those jeans,' Lol had said.

Merrily had yawned and asked if it was OK to go up to her cell in Prof's cottage and lie down for a while.

There was no need to show her to the room; she knew the way. And, anyway, Prof had rung then.

It was evening now, with a premature darkening of the sky. Probably the coming of the long-forecast storm. Lol sat down in the booth with the Boswell, fingered the opening chords of the River Frome song. He needed to sleep; didn't think he'd be able to.

He thought about the Boswell Romany philosophy: live lightly. And love lightly? He couldn't love lightly, didn't think Al Boswell could either. He found himself wondering, not for the first time, what would have happened if Al and Sally hadn't found them in the hop-yard last night. Decided he wasn't going to think about that ever again.

Or about Gerard Stock hanging in his cell.

'Why did he have to kill himself?' Merrily had said. 'So many things nobody will ever know. Everyone said he wasn't the suicide type.'

'Circumstances can change the kind of person you are,' Lol said.

'Wolverhampton?'

'Experience. I...' He'd hesitated. 'Suppose he had a... prison visitor...?'

Merrily had said, 'Huw Owen uses the term "visitor" to describe the appearance of a relative or close friend a a comfort thing, usually.'

'Maybe I mean burglar. Maybe that's not logical. Where would it find female energy in the remand centre?'

'If there's one thing I've learned in the past year,' Merrily said, 'it's that human logic doesn't often come into it. But... there might be absolutely no paranormal context to Stock's death. I mean, I might have to operate on the basis that the Unseen permeates everything, but society functions well enough a if a little colourlessly a without it.'

Lol padded up the steps, along the minstrel's gallery and into his loft, as the first thunder sounded from the west. He took off his round, brass-rimmed glasses and popped them into their case on the plywood onion box serving as his bedside table.

A vivid mauve light filled the skylight above him. It was open a little, and the loft was filled with the rich caramel smell of ripened hay from the meadow.

Lol felt inexplicably upset.

Well, perhaps not that inexplicably.

He let himself fall back on to the camp bed. But it wasn't there. He came down on hay. He looked up at the blurred purple square of the skylight. Huh? Was he so overtired he'd climbed up to the wrong loft?

He reached for his glasses on the onion box.

A hand closed around his wrist.

With so little sleep in two days, they'd both been beyond exhaustion, but this had somehow made it both more intense and more nebulous. Maybe the fatigue was responsible, also, for that sense of been-here-before, if only in dreams, and Lol had been afraid to sleep in case this should turn out to be another one.

It was the storm that awoke him, creamy lightning in the skylight, and he jumped up to close it against the inevitable rain, climbing on the camp bed, which she'd folded up before spreading the hay and straw and the duvet on top of it.

She said she'd dreamed of Stock. The carcass turning slowly, from side to side.

'You see what you get sleeping with me,' Merrily said.

They made love again, under the thunder, and then she lay on her back, and the rain began to hit the skylight in long, slow drops, as if each one had been calculated.

a TWO a.

Strung Up.

MID-MORNING, MERRILY went back to the vicarage, and then she planned to go and visit the Shelbones a or try to. Lol wanted to go with her, and then thought no: love lightly. Don't seek to possess.

He went into the studio to think about creating a new song before Prof arrived back. Any new song; he knew it wasn't going to be a problem. The sky was washed clean. The Boswell guitar felt like a living thing.

It was around eleven-thirty when DI Frannie Bliss phoned from Leominster.

'Hope you don't think I lied to yer about that press statement, Lol, but it's not happened, has it? And now the lovely Snow Maiden's gone on a few days' leave. Which was unexpected.'

'It's God, Frannie. God looks after key personnel.'

'You didn't talk to anybody yourself, then?'

'Never really got chance, in the end.'

'Ah well...' Pause. 'Merrily wouldn't be there, would she?'

'Gone to work. I mean... she's... at work. Presumably.'

'Only, with the boss skiving off, the PM report on Stock's arrived on my desk, with no little controversy.'

'We were talking about Stock earlier.'

'A lot of people are talking about Stock again this morning.'

'It's what he would've wanted. We were still trying to think why he did it a hanged himself.'

'It's a mystery,' Frannie Bliss said. 'And not the only one.'

'Can I give Merrily a message?'

Bliss thought about it, sighed. 'Bugger it,' he said. 'This is tormenting me a bit. Stock strung himself up with his shirt, right?'

'That's what we heard.'

'The PM report says the severe ligature marks found on his neck are what you might call inconsistent with that. According to the Home Office pathologist and the forensics lab, we should be looking for a length of rusty wire, maybe seven or eight millimetres thick, probably multi-stranded. There was no sign of any such wire in Stock's cell. We can be fairly sure he did not bring any in with him. And it was certainly not around his neck when he was cut down. Needless to say, the remand centre is being searched, no doubt, even as we speak.'

'Strange.'

'It is, isn't it? There was also an impression on the side of his neck strongly suggestive of a hook being attached to the wire. One of my lads, who was a farmer's boy, had an idea what this might be.'

Lol said, 'You're talking about hop-wire, aren't you?'

Closing Credits.

FOR TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE with hops, kilns, furnaces, gypsies, exorcism etc., thanks to: Krys and Geoff 'Chovihano' Boswell (no relation), Paul Gibbons, Tony Heavens and Lynn, Mike Kreciala, Jeannine McMullen, Colin Osborne, Tony Priddle, John Pudge, Lisle Ryder, Tony Wargent and Trudy Williams.

Jani Sue Muhlestein gave me a timely reminder about Simon St John, whose rather gruelling earlier history is chronicled in December.

Once again, my wife, Carol, edited the manuscript with stunning perception, and pulled back the novel from the brink of the abyss with two perfectly tailored ideas. Thanks, too, to my editor, Peter Lavery, scourge of the staccato sentence, for the ultra-sensitive fine-tune, and to my agent, Andrew Hewson, who solved that delicate final problem. (Look, she's a 37-year-old woman...!) If I bent the facts about the hop industry in the Frome Valley, no blame should be attached to A Pocketful of Hops, produced and published by The Bromyard Local History Society or Richard Filmer's Hops and Hop Picking (Shire). On Romanies, Patrick 'Jasper' Lee's We Borrow the Earth (Thorsons) was an inspiration, as were Jean-Paul Clebert's seminal Gypsies and the haunting and evocative A Time from the World by Rowena Farre and Raymond Buckland's Gypsy Witchcraft and Magic. I'm still not sure know how much of a threat a mulo is to a gaujo, but my advice is: don't chance it.

Martin Israel's profound and unflinchingly direct book, Exorcism, is published by the SPCK.

All the characters are entirely imaginary, and no councillors or officials, bent or clean, in the story have any connection with the members or staff of the existing Herefordshire Council. The Barnchurch Trading Estate is not, we must all hope, on anyone's planning schedule. And while West Mercia Police may have had their problems over the years, none, to my knowledge, have been in relation to the Frome Valley, where Knight's Frome may be difficult to find and nobody remembers the Emperor.