No time for this. She rolled off the sofa to tug one of the suitcases up the stairs to the bathroom, unload soap and flannel, toothpaste, electric toothbrush, deodorant, towels, underwear. Zipped up the case to take home with her and refill. Maybe one more trip before bedtime – didn’t want to keep going back to the vicarage next week to trouble Martin Longbeach for essential items she’d left behind.
Standing in Lol’s doorway, she felt held in an odd, airless state of transition. Neither here nor there. It was not a particularly warm night – there’d been none so far this summer – but at least the rain was holding off and the cobbled square was mellowed in the yellow-pink glow of the fake gaslamps while a flat, waxing moon dangled like a medal above the church steeple.
Six cars and two Land Rovers were parked on the cobbled square. The council was trying to turn it into a mini pay-and-display car park, and the village was fighting it. Quite right, too, if the Council was prepared to wreck tourism for short-term gain. Visitors hated an unexpected charge in some olde worlde village. It created ill-will against a community which had done nothing to deserve it.
Always some battle in Ledwardine, probably no bad thing.
Ochre lights burned blearily behind the leaded mullioned windows of the Black Swan. She’d have to go across there tomorrow, tell Barry she wouldn’t be at the vicarage next week but Martin Longbeach would. And then she’d have to tell Gomer Parry, who could perhaps keep an eye on Martin because… well, who knew?
When she was locking Lol’s front door behind her, there was a movement on the square: someone in a long mac and a hat coming out of a grey car on the edge of the cobbles, walking over to the market hall to stand uncertainly by one of its corner oak pillars, looking across at the vicarage.
Merrily paused. The man moved slowly across the cobbles, still glancing up, after every couple of paces, towards the vicarage where the security light was splintered by overhanging trees. Merrily stepped quietly back into the shadow of the Church Street terrace.
There was something about that walk that wasn’t…
Oh God.
The figure had passed under one of the fake gaslamps, and she’d seen white hair, long neck, cheekbones so high they looked painful for the skin. She’d seen Sylvia Merchant, now decisively crossing the road to the vicarage, vanishing under the moon-dappled ash tree beside the gate.
Bloody hell. Sylvia Merchant coming to visit? Normal reaction would be to walk boldly over, invite her in for a cup of tea and a chat. Ask her – diplomatically, at first – where exactly she’d got the idea that a few prayers constituted an attempted exorcism.
But there was Sophie…
… had to call Ms Merchant back and tell her that I’d forgotten you were on holiday.
George Curtiss, Cathedral canon, was supposed to have gone to talk some sense into Sylvia Merchant. Diplomatic George. What had happened to that idea?
Merrily slipped back inside Lol’s cottage, shut the door and returned to the living room, keeping the light out. Watching from the window, opening it slightly, in time to pick up, from across the silence, the echoing thock, thock of a knocker on old oak.
Evidently, Ms Merchant had been given reason to think the vicar was not on holiday. But if she wanted to talk, rather than file a complaint, why didn’t she phone first?
After a couple of minutes, Ms Merchant emerged from under the trees and seemed to be talking to someone, rather crossly. Nobody there, of course. Nobody on the square except Ms Merchant, her coat hanging open, the end of the belt swinging.
Mutter, mutter.
Ms Merchant stood looking around the village square. The only sounds were the distant hiss and thump of the juke box in the Ox, down the bottom of Church Street. Normality.
For a shivery moment, Merrily was reminded of Big Weale, the Mid Wales solicitor whom Eileen Cullen, the nursing sister from Hereford Hospital, had sworn she’d seen emerging from the hospital mortuary, where his dead wife lay, followed by… an indistinctness. Big Weale had been very dangerously disturbed. Probably nothing like that happening here. People did chat to the recently departed. Nothing wrong with that. Part of the process of letting go.
Ms Merchant didn’t immediately return to her car but walked a few yards up to the church lychgate, looking up at the moon over the steeple. Stayed there for a couple of minutes before presumably deciding, by the absence of interior lights, that Merrily wasn’t in the church either, then walked back to the square.
The light from a fake gaslamp, as she passed under it, showed she was smiling, rather grimly, as she unlocked the car with the bleeper and then went around to the passenger door and held it open for the empty air.