All of a Winter's Night

by Phil Rickman

  Wow. Dealer to the gentry. No way he could convince her he hadn’t been loving that at the time.

  ‘I reckon that was where it all went to shit.’ He stared into his cloudy cider. ‘Previously, the stock I had in, you could pass it off as personal use. What I reckon is one of the rich bastards muster shopped me, ’cos suddenly the law’s all over me. So now I’m layin’ off, all right? Not worth going away for. Plus, everybody’s killing theirselves with legal highs these days, anyway. You can’t compete there.’

  ‘Unless it’s on health grounds, have you tried that?’

  His eyes narrowed, as much as Dean’s eyes ever could, and then he got it and smiled.

  ‘You want the truth, Jane? After Lloyd got hisself killed, I was scared they was gonner be down on me again. Them bastards, if they want you for dealing and they can’t prove it’s you, they’ll just plant some gear on you.’

  ‘Why would they bother?’

  ‘’Cos Lloyd’s ole man’s a bloody big farmer and he en’t exac’ly gonner be over the moon about this, is he?’

  ‘No. Probably not.’

  ‘He’s gonner want a bloody scalp.’

  ‘It’s not the Wild West, Dean.’

  ‘En’t it?’

  His eyes swivelling. Nobody was looking at them now, but Jane recognized a couple of blokes as farmers. A strange, marginal world, agriculture. Men with hundreds of acres around them who still could feel paranoid. Millionaires, on paper, with old patched jackets and no cash to spare. These guys drinking in the Ox because the beer was a couple of pence cheaper than the Swan’s.

  ‘So what is it with Aidan Lloyd?’ Dean said.

  ‘I thought you might know.’

  Wall frowned.

  ‘All one way with you, ennit, Jane? Don’t tell nothin’ to the peasants, they wouldn’t get it.’

  ‘That’s not fair.’

  ‘Should listen to yourself.’

  Jane drank some cider. It was all an act, anyway. Truth was, even as a kid of fifteen she’d been a bit scared of Wall and his mates, what they might do, although you must never let them know that. Was it about respect? Was it still that primitive? Because kids were primitive; out here or on some city estate, territorial issues were the same. But then they weren’t kids any more.

  She sighed.

  ‘So you weren’t a mate of Aidan Lloyd?’

  ‘Never give up, do you, girl?’ He looked weary, suddenly. ‘No, we wasn’t mates. He was ten years older’n me. More. Allus the bloody same, ennit? Somebody gets splattered all over the road, and it’s in the paper, everybody knew him, everybody was his mate. Listen, he hadn’t got no mates. Not from yere. Even these blokes who come for his funeral and stayed all night we din’t know ’em from—’

  ‘Hang on.’ Jane sat up. ‘What blokes?’

  Dean Wall said nothing. Jane didn’t look at him, tried hard to dampen her excitement, keep it casual.

  ‘We’re talking about some blokes who went to the funeral but, like, didn’t go home afterwards?’

  ‘Are we?’

  ‘Come on, Dean…’ Damn, she couldn’t hold it. ‘What blokes?’

  ‘I still don’t get what you’re after, Jane.’

  She sank back into her chair. Don’t say any more.

  Dean Wall thought for a few seconds, half smiling, then came slowly to his feet. Walked over to the bar where a fat guy they called Bing, son of the licensee, was playing some game on his tablet. Bing didn’t look up.

  ‘Same again, Dean?’

  ‘Not yet. I needs a word.’

  Dean looked over his shoulder. No sign of anybody else coming to the bar. Jane edged her chair a little closer, leaned forward to listen.

  ‘Them fellers you had B & B the other night,’ Dean said. ‘Where’d they come from?’

  ‘Who wants to know?’

  Bing prising himself away from his tablet, a bit irritated. Dean put both arms on the sodden beermats on the bar, leaned in, lowering his voice.

  ‘Police en’t been in yet, then?’

  Jane saw Bing shove his tablet under the bar.

  ‘You on about?’

  Leaning in towards Dean who shuffled further up the bar, turning his big back to Jane so that she lost the conversation, which went on for several minutes until Dean eased back and pointed a finger.

  ‘But you was nosy, Bing, right?’

  ‘Gotter be a bit careful…’

  ‘Still sounds like a bloody joke, mind.’

  Couple of minutes later, Dean Wall came back to the table, didn’t sit down. Picked up his cider, drained the glass, wiped his mouth and nodded at the door. Jane stood up and pulled her parka from the back of the chair.

  Outside, it was raining harder. Jane dragged on her parka and Dean went back into the Ox’s porch to light up a cig. An ordinary cig. He peered out through the smoke, grinning like a troll.

  ‘You owes me now, Jane,’ he said.

  10

  Wrongness

  IT WAS LONGER and tortuous, but there was no other way of getting back to the vicarage without crossing the square and being seen from the Black Swan.

  Hooded and anonymous in the downpour, she was going to ground in her own parish. Another intimation that this was the beginning of the end. So many omens now, and coming faster like the rain.

  Down into Old Barn Lane, conical Cole Hill glowering through the weather as if in judgement. Cowardice. Was it? Probably. He’ll be going to work on you. What could Crowden do, for heaven’s sake? Priests argued, always had, always would. You followed your own spiritual path, listened to the silence. Or that was how it used to be. It also used to be concealed blades and whispers in darkened cloisters. Now you could be shafted in an email.

  The rain came in harder, grim and grey, better than fog but only just, as she went the back way, past baby-pink new homes, the kind of flat-pack housing that seemed to go up overnight. Finally dropping down through three centuries into Church Street with its crooked cottages climbing organically from the river.

  She crossed the street and walked up to the vicarage just around the corner, let herself in and went through to the kitchen. Nobody there except Ethel watching from her bed near the stove, deciding it wasn’t worth getting up.

  ‘Jane?’ She walked back into the hall, called up the stairs. ‘Jane!’

  Evidently gone out. Too much to expect her to rest the ankle.

  Merrily caught sight of her face in the hall mirror, wet hair stuck to her furrowed forehead, recoiled. Bit fragile, to be honest.

  She spun away, went back outside and found herself across the road, where the cobbles of the square, with its few shops, gave way to the tarmac of Church Street and a small nameplate said Lucy’s Cottage.

  Lol had had it made after Jane had said there ought to be an official blue plaque. Merrily stood there at the window, saw him at the desk, backlit by the woodstove, the Boswell guitar across a knee. His lyric pad would be open on the desk with his iPhone in memo mode for the tunes. Lol had taken to working strict hours, like he had a proper job, and perhaps that was what it had become.

  He spotted her. She found a smile, pushed back her hood and Lol sprang up – how many times had she done this: Sanctuary, sanctuary – and then he was standing in the open doorway in his old grey sweatshirt with the fading Roswell alien across the chest, peering at her over his glasses.

  ‘So, um… what happened to the Legion?’

  ‘Infiltrated,’ Merrily said, ‘by an emissary from the Witchfinder General.’

  Feeling the sting of either rain or tears.

  Jane let herself into the vicarage. Hung her parka next to Christ with his lantern, kicked off her boots, hurried up to her apartment in the attic.

  There had to be images and they had to be better ones than the faintly comic pictures in her head. She stood at the window, looking down between the vicarage trees to the square, where the fog had been shredded by the rain, exposing a darkening sky, clouds low and leathery.

  Behind
her, the computer cheeped and groaned, while she went over it all again in her head: what Dean Wall had told her in the porch at the Ox. Something so far from what she’d expected that it really did, as he’d said, seem like a joke.

  Dean – you could underestimate his ingenuity – getting some things out of Bing by telling him the police were interested. He hadn’t got everything – no names, for a start – but it was enough for now. Essentially, she was faced with a whole tradition about which she knew next to nothing. A man-thing, surely. Like dominoes and darts. An archaic, uncool, plodding man-thing.

  The computer settled and she sat down in front of the screen and went into Google Images, thinking it might take some time. But it didn’t take long at all, although it was still crazy.

  Lol made tea and listened. Built up the logs in the wood stove and listened. Watched the day darken and went on listening to Merrily, while picking up stray echoes of Prof Levin.

  You don’t want to come back from some distant gig to find cases packed.

  It didn’t even need a distant gig. You came back from one fog-related overnight in the granary at Knight’s Frome to hear about the Bishop at work again, but that was only this morning.

  As for last night…

  He slammed the stove door.

  ‘What were you thinking, going out there?’

  He’d talked in depth to Huw Owen – just the two of them – only once. Merrily had told him how Huw had tried to talk her out of deliverance, telling her how, as a female exorcist, she’d become a target for every psychotic grinder of the dark satanic mills that ever sacrificed a chicken. Memorable. It had stuck with Lol, too, and he’d asked Huw about it. Huw had smiled. I thought it sounded a bit bloody daft at the time, if I’m honest, lad. Like the script for one of them cheap TV ghost shows, where all the ghosts are demons and every house has a portal to hell. But I’m glad you’ve remembered it.

  ‘What else could I do?’ Merrily said. ‘I’m just sorry I let Jane go with me. But then, what would I have done to stop her?’

  ‘Who were they?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Could they have known you’d seen them?’

  ‘Don’t think so.’

  ‘Was it some kind of religious…?’

  ‘You mean was it satanic? I don’t know what that word means any more.’

  She’d sat on the sofa and kicked off her shoes. She had on a cowl-neck sweater and jeans. What little make-up she was wearing had run and dried. She looked a mess. She looked heartbreakingly wonderful.

  He said, ‘You could’ve called me. I would’ve come back, you know that. Might’ve taken a while, but—’

  ‘And you might’ve piled into the back of a long-distance lorry in blanket fog. And if you’d been there, too… I don’t know. I don’t know what would’ve happened. Maybe nothing good. In the end, nothing was damaged except Jane’s ankle. And a night’s sleep. And now I don’t know where Jane’s gone or if her ankle…’

  ‘She seems OK. She’s been past here twice.’

  ‘Going where?’

  ‘No idea. Would hardly be surprising if she’d been up to the churchyard, though, would it?’

  ‘No.’ Her eyes clenched shut. ‘I really thought I knew this place. I thought we were all…’

  Marry me, Lol thought, a persistent ache awakening. Please marry me.

  ‘There are no havens any more,’ Merrily said. ‘Nowhere’s safe. Everywhere gets infiltrated.’

  ‘But there’s nothing in the churchyard this morning. You did say you’d—’

  ‘No. Nothing there. It might never’ve happened. It might – whatever it was – be all over.’

  He sat down on the rug, opposite her.

  ‘But not for you,’ he said.

  Knowing instinctively what she was thinking.

  The word ‘portal’, Huw had said, is much misused. In the American ghost shows, it’s always in the basement, next to the washing machine or the chest freezer. In reality it’s in here. Tapping his head. Or here. His heart. Or, if you want to get really technical, there. His solar plexus. Or it’s a far bigger and still uncharted area… like, for instance, the women’s ministry. We’re all too shit scared of being accused of sexism to say it, but the women’s priesthood’s still new enough to be a magnet for mad bastards. Let’s not say it but, bloody hell, we need to be aware of it.

  ‘You’re wondering if things like this never happened before you came,’ Lol said softly. ‘And if they’d stop happening if you weren’t here.’

  ‘I don’t know. What I do know is I keep running away. Last night I ran away from whatever was in the churchyard—’

  ‘Yeah, but you had no—’

  ‘And this morning, just now, I ran away from Paul Crowden. I should’ve gone back in. Taken him on.’

  ‘I don’t think so. Your mate from Merthyr was probably right. A trap? I mean, I wouldn’t know about that, but it can’t do any harm to make a few quiet enquiries before you get drawn in.’

  ‘Oh, and yesterday, I buried a man I really knew nothing about. I mean, how…’ Her eyes widening. ‘How could I have done that? All the warnings you get in the deliverance ministry about the dangers of the perfunctory funeral. And I did that. I conducted a perfunctory funeral.’

  ‘But it was what they wanted, no fuss. You were in their hands. They could’ve had him buried without a minister at all, if they’d wanted. Couldn’t they?’

  ‘Not in my churchyard.’

  She smiled. He wanted to weep. Should they discuss marriage before or after he told her that the TV commercial for mature people’s mortgages would not, after all, be securing their financial future?

  ‘So you’re making a definite connection with the funeral,’ he said. ‘With the Lloyds.’

  ‘Not sure.’

  ‘In the churchyard, apart from the shock and everything, you got a sense of…’

  ‘Wrongness,’ Merrily said. ‘There was an overpowering sense of wrongness, which I’ve avoided talking about to Jane, because Jane’s still attracted to paganism, and if that’s what we saw…’

  ‘Evil?’

  ‘That’s a much deeper word.’

  Lol watched Merrily cupping her face in her hands, gazing into the stove. He felt helpless.

  ‘Wrongness all down the line.’ Her eyes seemed to lose focus. ‘From a cold funeral to some clandestine ritual in the fog that I can’t ask questions about because A, the family wouldn’t want it, and B…’

  ‘B is for Bishop,’ Lol said.

  He stood up and walked over to the window.

  ‘That shouldn’t stop me,’ Merrily said. ‘When the inevitable happens, I’ll just be regretting all the significant things I didn’t do in an effort to keep my job a little bit longer.’

  Lol could see that the rain had thinned but the clouds hadn’t gone anywhere. It was going to be a short day. In his head, Prof Levin said, Don’t tell me there isn’t a part of you that secretly hopes this business with the Bishop will drive her out of the damn Church once and for all.

  ‘Jane,’ he said.

  ‘That’s another problem.’

  ‘No, I mean Jane’s coming across the street. Barely limping at all.’

  11

  Crow-people

  A LONG TIME since Merrily had seen Jane like this. A rare excitement. Face flushed under a tumble of hair. Burning up with something. A reminder of how, when you were nineteen, your whole life could accelerate past something in minutes, blowing off night-fears like exhaust.

  ‘Not interrupting anything, am I?’ Jane sinking into Lol’s battered sofa, clearly not caring what she was interrupting. ‘I just need… confirmation that I’m not losing my mind?’

  A glance at Lol and then back at Merrily, who knew what she was asking.

  ‘He knows about last night. All of it. Where’ve you been?’

  ‘Been making myself useful for what seems like the first time in weeks. Talking to people you wouldn’t think of approaching.’ Jane took a l
ong breath, let it go and stood up, moving across to the desk and Lol’s laptop. ‘Can I?’

  ‘Just save what’s on there first, would you, Jane?’ Lol said. ‘It’s probably crap, but…’

  Jane grinned briefly and nodded, saving the document and inserting a memory stick.

  ‘Don’t dismiss this till you see it properly. It’s from the Net. Not exactly the Dark Net or anything. On the surface, this is all so innocent you’ll probably laugh. Though I’m not laughing.’

  Merrily saw she was actually quite angry.

  ‘Jane, when you said you’d talked to people, you didn’t tell anybody—?’

  ‘No! Of course I didn’t. Not a word. I just asked questions about Aidan Lloyd. Who nobody seemed to know anything about until he got killed and then they were all over him. And his dope.’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘What you’re about to see isn’t likely to get anyone too interested, either. It’s not illegal, it’s not irreligious – not that anybody would give a toss about that – and it’s not—’

  ‘Jane,’ Merrily said. ‘Just run it.’

  Flashing a glance at Lol, who went to sit down on the sofa, hands clasped on his knees.

  Jane stepped away from the desk.

  ‘I need to give you the background first.’

  The Ox. It was always the Ox. A scruffy pub with a far more interesting clientele, when you thought about it, than the more upmarket Black Swan, even though it only had two rooms available for overnight stays, three in an emergency.

  Jane explained how they’d come in two Land Rovers. Seven or eight of them. They’d block-booked the Ox, paid up front. All male. Two of them had grey beards, a couple had local accents. Jane said Bing had thought he might’ve recognized one of them but he wasn’t sure.

  ‘He told you all this? Bing?’

  ‘Kind of.’

  If these strangers had gone to Aidan Lloyd’s funeral, they hadn’t turned up at the tea at the Black Swan, attended mainly by other farmers Merrily recognized.