This was after her unplanned, controversial speech to the assembly, on the subject of women and ghosts.

‘Shot my mouth off,’ she told Huw, sitting now on the other side of the smashed cairn. ‘I’d had a… all right, a psychic experience. One lasting several weeks. Not the kind I could avoid, because it was right there in the vicarage. Possibly a former incumbent, possibly just… a volatile. Plenty of sensations, sounds, possibly hallucinatory – I only ever actually saw it once. Anyway, it was just screwing me up. I didn’t know how to deal with it, and Jane saying: “Didn’t they teach you anything at theological college, Mum?” And I’m thinking, yeah, the kid’s right. Here we are, licensed priests, and the one thing they haven’t taught us is how to handle the supernatural. I didn’t know about Mr Dobbs then. I didn’t even know that every diocese needed to have one, or what exactly they did. I just wanted to know how many other women felt like me – or if I was being naive.’

‘Touched a nerve?’

‘Probably. It certainly didn’t lead to a discussion, and nobody asked me anything about it afterwards. Except for Michael Hunter. He came over later in the restaurant, bought me lunch. I thought, he was just… Anyway, that was how it happened. Obviously, I’d no idea then that he was going to be my new bishop.’

‘But he remembered you. Once he’d got his feet under the table and realized, as a radical sort of lad, that he could already have a bit of a problem on his hands: namely Canon T.H.B. Dobbs, his reactionary old diocesan exorcist. Not “Deliverance minister”. Decidedly not.’

‘I’m afraid “Deliverance consultant” is the Bishop’s term.’

‘Aye.’ She felt his smile. ‘You know why Dobbs doesn’t like the word Deliverance? Because the first two syllables are an anagram of devil. That’s what they say. Must’ve been relieved, Mick Hunter, when the old bugger got his little cardiac prod towards retirement.’