‘Oh dear,’ Mrs Aird said. ‘Your sins always find you out, don’t they? Yes, bring that chair out, dear, we can sit together in the window. Bring your tea.’

The sun-lounge overlooked the valley, across the long village of Colwall and on and on over Herefordshire, all the way to the Black Mountains and Wales.

‘How did you know?’

Mrs Aird had the kind of West Midlands accent which wore anxiety like old and trusted slippers. She was about seventy-five, soft-featured and with lightly blonded hair.

‘Oh…’ Merrily put down the cane chair with its thick, padded seat. ‘It’s just that if anyone’s inquired about exorcism, the arrangement is that the office tells me or our secretary, Sophie. And nobody seems to have.’

‘Well, no, I never rang the Diocese. That’s just what I told Mr Spicer. He’s a good man, Mr Spicer, at the bottom of him, give him his due, but he’s a man, isn’t he? And he has had a lot of personal problems lately. I thought, he’s just not going to do anything, is he? And I was telling a friend – we used to be neighbours when I lived in the Forest of Dean and we’ve kept in touch, and I was telling her on the phone about what had happened, and she immediately said I should get the Rector to ask for you. That’s how I got the number. Her name’s Ingrid Sollars.’

‘Oh.’ That was OK; nothing wrong with Ingrid Sollars. ‘Yes, she was involved in… a problem we had. She’s a nice woman.’

‘A much stronger person than me, I’m afraid. I get very frightened about things I don’t… well, none of us understands them, do we? We can’t. We’re not supposed to. But Ingrid gave me your number and she said you’d take it seriously, but it would be best to go through the Rector, for political reasons. But I get so frightened, now, you see.’

Mrs Aird had a single, lonely chair in the window. Called it her sunset chair. Never missed a sunset. You could just see Herefordshire Beacon, on the far left, but nothing of the road, although you could hear the traffic above you, like a sporadic draught in the attic.