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‘Mum met Khan at Wychehill, in the course of the job?’
    ‘When Syd Spicer was vicar there. I went over with her a couple of times, as you know, but I never met Khan.’
    ‘Thing is, Lol, the dealers and the fences and all that in Hereford, they all live on the Plascarreg and everybody knows that. But Khan’s in another league. He has this respectable side. You see his picture in the paper with councillors.’
    ‘But he also has a respectable side?’ Lol said.
    Jane laughed. She’d really missed Lol. Realized she hadn’t seen him for nearly two months. He was wearing a dark jacket over a sea-green T-shirt. Looking tired, but in a good way. His hair was shorter. Since he and Mum had become an item, she’d had to concentrate on not fancying him any more, counting every new grey hair, that kind of thing.
    But now…
    She felt queasy. In the mullioned window above their table, the panes of thick, scarred glass had dulled to near-opaque.
    She dug out a smile.
    ‘You had this planned? Dinner?’
    ‘Not really, it was just a spur of the moment thing. With getting back early.’
    ‘Romantic.’
    ‘We’ve never actually done it before. Seemed like extravagance.’
    ‘Special occasion?’
    ‘Not really. Just that I’m home. Properly home.’
    ‘And, like… you have a little box in your pocket? With a ring in it?’
    He looked worried.
    ‘You think I should have? You think she—?’
    ‘No.’ Jane patted his hand. ‘Bound to be the wrong kind. In the movies it can be like a curtain ring or a keyring. Real life, always more complicated. But hey…’
    ‘We
have
talked about it,’ Lol said.
    ‘Yeah, well, keep talking. If you ever get another chance.’
    She wondered if
she
could talk to him properly. About some things she really would not like to tell Mum. She’d noticed how Lol had kept looking at her, puzzled, like he thought she’d changed.
    God, what a mess she was.
    Too warm in the glittery dress, too informal, too girly.
God.
Merrily had offered Mr Khan coffee, which he’d declined, then tea, which he’d accepted – did she
have
Earl Grey? She’d had to go down on her knees to a rarely opened cupboard under the worktop. The Earl Grey packet had been embarrassingly dusty.
    ‘As I recall,’ Mr Khan said, ‘when we met, you were investigating, on behalf of your diocese, a series of road accidents in the Malvern hills, prior to which the drivers experienced either the same hallucination or… something else.’
    He paused, as if giving her a chance to finish the story, which she didn’t plan to do. It had no happy ending, they both knew that.
    ‘The job title is Diocesan Exorcist?’ he said. ‘Is that correct?’
    ‘Tends to operate under different names nowadays. Deliverance Consultant, Adviser on the Paranormal. I think the Church is hoping it’ll get lost in a scattering of inexact terminology.’
    ‘But you’re still doing that?’ he said.
    ‘Far as I know.’
    ‘The casting out of devils.’
    ‘Well, that’s a bit…’
    ‘Extreme?’
    ‘A bit.’
    He nodded solemnly, leaning back in the cane chair, hands in his lap, the pot of Earl Grey between them on the refectory table. How long had he been feigning this absurd young-fogey gentility? What did he think it conveyed, apart from that he was someone you’d be a little crazy to trust?
    ‘OK, devils,’ Merrily said carefully. ‘Some of my colleagues would tell you that was all in the movies. I wouldn’t be quite so dismissive. Never had to carry out a major exorcism – that is, an attempt to release someone from alleged demonic possession. Never easy to distinguish from mental illness. Apparently.’
    Raji Khan was nodding. He had his sinister side, but how much of that was theatre? He looked down and bent to pick up something from the flags.
    Ethel, the cat. He sat her on his knees.
    ‘What about houses, Mrs Watkins?’
    ‘In what respect?’
    ‘Houses that might appear to be inhabited by… what you might call