Friends of the Dusk (31 page)

‘Don’t matter, lass. He were playing for the other side. Don’t matter why. Don’t matter what they said or didn’t say, it went deep.
Bloody
deep.’

‘And was buried even deeper.’

‘Their only consolation was it happened in Hereford. The arse-end of nowhere. And, credit where it’s due, they moved fast to put the diocese into a safe pair of hands.’

Bernie Dunmore, suffragan Bishop of Ludlow. Close enough to know something of the situation, old enough to sit on it.

‘I’m guessing Innes had been in the wings a long time,’ Huw said. ‘Dunmore were never really chief-executive material, and he knew that. He happen also knew who was in line to succeed him and said nowt. These things get settled behind closed doors.’

‘At my level, we don’t even know where the doors are.’

‘Dunmore was about buying time, we knew that,’ Huw said. ‘He hung on longer than expected, but that were no bad thing. Canterbury having quietly set up a working group to deal with what’d become known as The Hereford Issue.’

‘You know that for a fact?’

Huw leaned back into a pool of sunlight.

‘Once talked to a feller – I’m not going to name him, but I were up north, catching up wi’ a few folks. Attending a small dinner party in York, not my scene usually, but I couldn’t get out of it. This feller, he used a word from them daft American ghost shows on the idiot channels. Ah, he says, the Hereford
dark portal.
Needs to be sealed off once and for all, don’t you think?’

‘That was a joke, right?’

‘It were said in a way where you could
take
it for a joke.’

‘Jesus,’ Merrily said.

‘What to do about Hereford,’ Huw said. ‘Do you appoint a deeply spiritual man – High Church, candle-burner, incense-swinger?’

‘Too medieval?’

‘Or do you go the other way? A low-church hard bastard. Happen there were long, private discussions in back rooms – discussions as never took place. See, wi’ nobody talking like this any more, it’s easy to forget nowadays what the Church were originally supposed to be about. Don’t you think?’

‘I think about it all the time. So what did this… working group… come up with?’

Huw smiled.

‘Haven’t seen the report. If there
was
a report, which I doubt. But the result, of course, is Craig Innes. A bland and pragmatic man on the surface, steel frame underneath. A mixture of modernism and the Welsh Chapel mentality. Not so much a new broom as an industrial Hoover. Gets into the dark corners.’

‘Including mine.’

‘Especially yours. He’s been put in place to wipe out the last traces of Mick Hunter and all his works.’

‘I’m still seen as part of Hunter’s work and, as such, the Church wants me out?’

‘The Church is saying to Innes, Do what you need to, but don’t draw attention to it.’

‘Because I’m one of the last links with Hunter?’

‘
Because
, lass, you know as much of the truth as it’s possible for anybody to know.’

‘Well, yes, but which I don’t talk about because everybody would think I was crazy. Why have they left me alone for so long?’

‘Because the Church has always moved grindingly slowly. And of course you’ve done a good job, handled more hot potatoes in a couple of years than Dobbs stuck a fork into for his entire career. You’ve made mistakes and a few iffy friends, you’ve taken wrong turnings. But Dunmore always liked you, even when you made things hard for him. All right, occasionally, he’d be told to give you a prod, like making you work in a committee with that bloody shrink and Siân. But even Siân’s come round.’

‘I thought so, too.’

Huw folded his arms.

‘I just don’t know, lass. It’s clear he can’t just get rid of you, he’s got to try and make you bugger off of your own free will.’

‘Rural dean…’

‘Promotion. A vote of confidence. That’s a good start. Go on. Play me the rest.’

There were bits they could skip, business unrelated to deliverance. It was clear Innes hadn’t wanted to come on too heavy with Siân. The purpose of this meeting was to deal with human-recources issues, including whether the rural dean job should be offered to Merrily – Siân hardly in a position to say no to that.

And Siân had been a barrister, a useful hard wall to bounce his ideas off.

Slowly, Innes unwrapped his bundle, laid out his case against Merrily Watkins continuing to operate as deliverance consultant.

He had everything. Either he’d researched it himself, with the help of unknown people within the diocese, or the putative Working Party had given him a file, which even included an interview Merrily had once done – with the full agreement of Bernie Dunmore – for a national magazine.

‘… where she says…’
Innes evidently consulting a tablet or something.
‘“It still amazes me when I meet a member of the clergy who purports to believe in a supernatural God but rejects the possibility of anything else.”’

A baffled pause before Siân replied.

‘Is there something wrong with that?’

‘How many ghosts do you find in the Bible?’

‘It doesn’t do ghosts, but that—’

‘Surely the message from the Bible is that we should disregard the – probably mythological – byways which distract from our focus on God.’

‘And people who’ve become trapped in the byways… we don’t try to help them?’

Thank you, Siân.

But his answer was predictable and final.

‘There are people more qualified to help them.’

And then, of course, he’d talked about the police. It seemed to Innes that she’d almost courted the controversial, becoming so involved with criminal investigators that they now regarded
her almost as
their
consultant. Which meant that she was dealing with issues which would not normally come to the Church’s attention, with the inevitable neglect of her normal pastoral duties.

He told Siân about his meeting with the chief constable of West Mercia and the head of Hereford CID.

His information, he said, was that Detective Chief Inspector Howe was not well disposed towards Mrs Watkins, although she’d been unexpectedly reticent over lunch. He’d learned much more in a meeting with a group of prominent Herefordshire councillors which had included Howe’s father.

‘Bloody Charlie Howe,’ Merrily said to Huw. ‘Innes might’ve been told everything about me, but it looks like he knows nothing at all about Charlie.’

Innes said it was County Councillor Howe who, in disclosing his discomfort over the relationship, had called Merrily, in a disparaging way, ‘a consultant’ to the police. Or rather to ‘one ambitious detective’. Unnamed.

‘All I’d say to that,’
Siân said,
‘is that the police deal with unacceptable behaviour which is often seen as evil, and there’re often moral and spiritual choices—’

‘Evil?’
The Bishop’s voice raised to pulpit level.
‘If you’re looking for evil, I’ll point you in yet another direction. There’s a—’

Merrily froze it again.

‘I freely confess that this is not going to sound good.’

42

Swallow the pill

A
FTER A WHILE
, Jane realized she might have made a mistake using her own name – easy to discount the kind of creeps you encountered up some of these online alleys. But then she’d had no reason to think that Aisha Malik was in that deep.

It hadn’t taken long finding the kid through the Facebook search box. On the old iMac at her desk under the Mondrian walls, Jane had checked out five Aishas, but only one belonged to the Foxy Rowlestone Appreciation Society.

Which had over thirty thousand members – seriously impressive with the series discontinued. Not that many of them accepted this.

Evidently a heavy-duty mystic.

Jane’s membership of FRAS had been approved within ten minutes. She’d looked up the books on Amazon, and they were still getting almost daily reader-reviews, more of them these days coming from adults for whom new editions seemed to have been issued as e-books with starkly monochrome covers.
Probably OK for children
, one reader said,
but it scared the hell out of me.

On the fan forum, it was only a short scroll to the weird stuff.

The moderators had left it alone. It was a little late for spoilers. Still that
was
a gobsmacker. Geraint the blacksmith’s son had really emerged on the dark side? Or had his life been a necessary sacrifice to enable him to take on the Summoner on his own plane of existence? And if Catherine was still human that would pose some interesting challenges for the Book Three which never happened.

There was a thread speculating on how this would change things. Like how could Geraint not be a
good vampire
?

‘There are no good vampires,’ Jane murmured.

Jane was shaking her head, although she could totally understand how vivid fantasies could form, and that fear was
an essential part of it. A dark rite of passage. You had to go through the deepest fear to find the deepest love.

Not unexpectedly, there were posts from kids claiming to be Geraint, posting pictures of guys who were clearly not them. Some claimed to be friends of his, offering to set up meetings with him for Those Who Dare. There were even takers.

This was more than slightly scary. This was where the creep element came in. You could only hope the obsessive fans would run like hell when Geraint started sending them pictures of his cock.

In another thread, several people were boasting about knowing exactly where the Nightlands were. None of them getting it right, as far as Jane could see.

No word from Aisha. Evidently, she was just a lurker on FRAS. Her Facebook page suggested she wasn’t over-fussed about privacy settings, but there wasn’t much of her on show. Her friends were other girls of around the same age, her likes were unsurprising: kid bands, fantasy films and Foxy Rowlestone. She’d left many of the personal spaces blank, had posted some
pictures of her family, Foxy book covers and fragments of landscape that Jane half recognized. But all fairly sketchy.

The list of groups she belonged to flashed up different signals. Jane had hit the
join
buttons for all of them, thinking she could get out easily enough, although you could leave a trail.

Too late now. Waiting for her memberships to be approved – it could take minutes or, for more obscure groups, days – Jane stood by the attic window looking down over the hedge, between the shedding trees, to the village, coolly lit by the late-autumnal sun, its painted walls white as freshly squeezed toothpaste between the timbers.

Strange to think that Mum, of all people, had gone through a goth period, which she talked about occasionally, with entirely justified embarrassment: the black lipstick, the vintage albums by Siouxsie and the Banshees. Early teenage decadence. She must have been very young, younger than Aisha. And even more naive.

Or maybe not. It had always been there, the sexuality of vampirism. The love bites that went deeper. It was only
since
Mum’s time that it had changed, becoming weirdly innocent. Those Twilight vamps who didn’t go all the way. Not for a long time, anyway. Not without true love.

How naive was that.

Jane felt tight inside.

The Fang Forum accepted her within half an hour. It was mildly entertaining, with adverts for pointy dental caps and red contact lenses so you could see the whole world through bloodlight. It also seemed to have become some kind of goth dating agency, with images of vampire weddings and – less healthy – vampire babies in vintage black prams, with little skull mobiles dangling from their awnings, and vampire toddlers who, presumably, had grown blood teeth instead of milk teeth.

Chances were that these kids would grow up entirely normal, taking the piss out of their sad old parents, people like…

… well, like
this.
Image of a couple with red-rimmed lips, middle-aged infants at a face-painting party.

Jane skipped instructions on how best to leak quantities of blood without severing a significant artery. Also the long discussion about the nutritional benefits of sanguinary exchange, blah, blah, yuk.

And then, suddenly…