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blessed be He.
    Except that Loy Tanner’s song was directed to a very different address.
‘The woman clothed with the sun,
She is the one!
She holds me,
Enfolds me
In a close embrace.
Face to face,
I feel the heat of her flame.
She calls me by my name.
She illumes me,
Consumes me,
The woman clothed with the sun –
The one!’

Chapter Six
    Outside, in the one-time kitchen garden, the cars were frosted under the freezing moon. They started sluggishly, moved off uncertainly, as if, like their occupants, reluctant to resume the life they were made for.
    As Jurnet edged his vehicle along at walking pace between the crowds still patiently waiting, Miriam said suddenly, ‘Go by the Market Place, would you mind? I’d like to take a proper look at those crosses.’
    â€˜OK. If you want. Though why –’
    â€˜I’ve never seen them close to, and I should think they’ll be taking them down after tonight.’
    â€˜If you want,’ Jurnet said again, contriving to make his ready compliance sound grumpy and disobliging. The detective was feeling deeply angry with himself. For the best part of two hours of twang, bang and boom, of indifferent tunes and crude vulgarizations of Biblical texts which deserved a better fate, he had been – like Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream , and with as little say in the matter – translated. That all about him were fellow-asses in similar case was no consolation. When the lights came up in the interval he had seen them moving their heads about, vaguely smiling, unable or unwilling to surface out of the cheap but potent fantasy in which they had been submerged.
    Down in the front row the head of Mrs Lark the Chair nodded slowly to and fro like the head of one of those china mandarins, black-pencilled moustache and all. The Bishop’s chaplain, in an attempt to regain his poise, blew a trumpet voluntary into his handkerchief. Only the Bishop, so jolly earlier, looked thoughtful, touching the cross on his breast every now and again: even a little scared.
    Miriam had kept her head turned away, withdrawn her hand.
    â€˜So you enjoyed it after all,’ now, in the car, she stated calmly, out of the depths of her lovely coat. Her instant grasp of the situation only put Jurnet even more at odds with himself. ‘Don’t look like that!’ Miriam protested. ‘What’s wrong about enjoying a really first-rate group? No need to act as if you’ve just come out of a blue movie and you’re wondering if you oughtn’t to make a clean breast of it to the Superintendent.’
    â€˜Not a question of enjoying or not enjoying. Question of being used, manipulated. Brainwashed.’ Jurnet glowered at the chapped young faces illuminated by the car’s headlamps. ‘Look at ’ em! Waiting for the great Loy Tanner to come past like he was Princess Di or Christ walking on the water. Pathetic! And you know what? Chap other side of me said actually the group have got a couple of caravans parked somewhere in the grounds, so he isn’t even coming. Always travel like that on tour to avoid the crowds, he said. Never put up in hotels. And all the fans know it. So what do these kids think they’re doing, standing about getting pneumonia for nothing?’
    â€˜They must think it’s for something, or they wouldn’t be doing it,’ the other pointed out reasonably. ‘It’s a free country. It’s not yet an offence to be young and besotted, thank heaven. Personally –’ Miriam stretched herself luxuriously, her right hand momentarily touching the detective’s thigh – ‘I feel great – used, manipulated, brainwashed and all. An evening I’ll never forget, if I live to be a hundred.’
    Suppressing a sudden wild desire to press down the accelerator, charge through the waiting ninnies to get there faster, Jurnet said, ‘Let’s go home and go to