39

27 October

HARRY WAS GETTING CLOSER TO THE TOWN. THE silhouettes of the great stone buildings were bigger every time he turned another bend in the road. Over his left shoulder a firework burst in the sky. He slowed the car a fraction more. He’d always loved fireworks. Maybe on 5 November he’d drive up the moor again, park the car and watch the fireworks exploding from a hundred different bonfire parties, stretching all the way across the Pennines.

The tarmac of the road gave way to cobbles and he turned the last corner that would bring him into town. Gold stars burst in the sky to his left and he was looking at them, not at the church, as he drew up and parked. He switched off the engine and got out of the car.

He’d been visiting one of his oldest parishioners. Mrs Cairns was in her nineties and almost bed-ridden. Afterwards, her daughter and husband had insisted he eat with them. By the time he left it was nearly nine o’clock and he still had to collect the church accounts from St Barnabas’s.

His feet had just made contact with the smooth stones of the church path when he knew something was wrong. He’d never considered himself a particularly sensitive man, but this feeling wasn’t one he could ignore. He knew he had to turn round and face the ruined church. And he really wasn’t sure he could bring himself to do it.

He had turned. He was looking. He just didn’t believe what he was seeing.

The ancient ruins of the abbey church were still there. The great arches still soared upwards, towards the purple sky. The tower, tall and forbidding, cast its shadow across the ground. Everything was just as it had been since the day he’d arrived. Pretty much as it had been for several hundred years. Only the figures were new. Sitting in window frames, leaning against pillars, sprawled along the top of arches, squeezed into every conceivable gap in the stonework were people. They sat, stood, leaned, sprawled, still as statues, mouths leering, eyes staring, surrounding him. Watching.