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Maybe not even one – who knew how long an instant was? Events were expanded by the mind according to their significance. This one had persuaded her, months later, to say yes to an extra role in the diocese, ajob which handed you the keys to a repository of collected shadows.
    The dictionary said:
    Exorcist: one who exorcizes or pretends to remove evil spirits by ritual means.
    Or something like that, suggesting that you could still qualify as an exorcist even if you only pretended to do it. Even if you thought it was bollocks.
    And the Church… Merely by introducing the replacement term, Deliverance, the Church had been backing away, softening it, erasing the shamanistic overtones, making it sound more like a social service, a token nod towards the boundaries of belief… and leaving a handy escape route, because who, in all seriousness, could, in this day and age, accept that people and premises could be psychically disinfected through a priest’s petition to that increasingly formless conceit known as God?
    Those blokes down there – solid, stoical, middle-aged priests. I can tell you four of them won’t go through with it. Out of the rest, there’ll be one broken marriage and a nervous breakdown.
    This was Huw Owen, in charge of C. of E. and Church-in- Wales Deliverance courses, now her self-appointed spiritual adviser. Whether you chose to dismiss it as pure delusion or the product of some brain-chemical cocktail, it was, Huw said, still capable of rotting the fabric of everyday life.
    A movement next to her.
    ‘Dark night of the soul, Lol,’ she said. ‘I collect them, as you know.’
    Had her thoughts been loud enough to wake him up, too? She reached for his hand.
    Lol said, ‘You want to – as they say – talk about it?’
    ‘Thought you’d never ask.’
    Lol had slipped across to the vicarage from his cottage in Church Street, just on twilight. Jane was spending the last weekend of her last school half-term at Eirion’s parents’ place near Abergavenny. Jane and Eirion had been down to Wiltshireto check out the Bronze Age dig where it looked like Jane would be starting her gap year in July, skivvying for archaeologists.
    And in her absence… well, everybody in Ledwardine must surely know about Lol and the vicar by now. Just that not everybody approved, and some of them were the most constant members of an unsteady congregation. Which made her, on top of everything else, a hypocrite.
    ‘So Sylvia Merchant sends for me – that’s what happens, we get sent for – to confirm what she wants to be the truth. And if it goes against centuries of established theology, well, anything can be changed these days, if you don’t like it much. And if God doesn’t like it… well, we created him, we can uncreate him. Up yours, God.’
    ‘That dark, huh?’ Lol said. ‘Poor soul.’
    ‘I should be unfrocked.’
    ‘You are.’
    ‘Oh yeah.’
    ‘So you went along with it.’
    ‘Mmm. Did the prayers.’
    ‘With the two of them?’
    ‘Don’t think I had a choice.’
    Huw Owen’s First Law of Deliverance – or it might be the second – was never to leave a disturbed environment without administering a blessing. What he told his exorcism students after the story of the woman who seemed like a liar and then killed herself.
    ‘Actually, I didn’t.’ Merrily sat up in bed, naked before God. ‘I asked for release. For both of them. Can’t remember the actual words, but that was the essence of it.’
    There was a mauve tint to the square panes of old glass. Later than she’d thought.
    Lol said, ‘How did she take it?’
    ‘I don’t know. I kept my eyes closed.’
    The implications were vast and terrifying. If you didn’t thinkit was delusion or brain chemicals. If you thought there was a possibility that you were more than a social service.
    She leaned into him, slid back down into the bed.
    ‘Actually, I’m not sure she took it very well. She was a head teacher. Used to calling the shots. Maybe