‘You don’t have to worry about the detective any longer, Chief Morland,’ said Conyer. ‘Our friends will take care of him for us. For now, though, the Dixons remain your responsibility. I want them watched. If they try to run, I want them stopped.

‘And if they get beyond the town limits,’ she added, ‘I want them killed.’

They drifted from the meeting. Nobody spoke. Morland went outside to smoke another cigarette, and watched them go. He didn’t care what Hayley Conyer thought of his nicotine addiction. It was the least of his worries. Anyway, his days as chief of police were now definitely numbered. She had emasculated him back in the living room, just as assuredly as if she had used on him the blade with which she had threatened Bryan Joblin. It was then appropriate somehow that it was only Luke Joblin who lingered after most of the others had departed, Souleby leaving alone, Ayton taking responsibility for the fading vileness of Kinley Nowell.

Morland offered Joblin a smoke, and he accepted.

‘I knew you hadn’t really given up.’

Joblin had spent the last couple of months trumpeting the fact that he’d kicked cigarettes, although he boasted loudest when his wife was near.

‘Barbara thinks that I have,’ said Joblin. ‘I don’t know which is costing me more, the cigarettes or the breath mints.’

Together they watched the rear light of the last car disappear as the vehicle turned on to the road and headed toward town.

‘Something on your mind, Luke?’ said Morland.

‘I’m worried,’ said Joblin.

‘About Bryan?’

‘Jesus, no. You’re right: he’s not bright, but he can take care of himself. If you need help with the Dixons, you can rely on him. He’s a stand-up young man.’

Bryan Joblin wasn’t a stand-up anything. He was borderline psychotic, with a deep wellspring of viciousness and sexual deviancy from which to draw, but Morland kept that opinion to himself. He had few friends on the board, and he didn’t need to alienate Luke Joblin too.

Joblin took a long drag on the cigarette. ‘No, it’s the Backers. I don’t understand why we didn’t approach them. We don’t want to cross them. They could crush us. We should have spoken to them before we acted, but Hayley shot down that idea as soon as it was raised. Why?’

‘Because we worship different gods,’ said Hayley Conyer from behind them.

Morland hadn’t even heard her approach. One second they were alone, and the next she had materialized at their backs.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Joblin, although it wasn’t clear if he was apologising for his criticism of the decision, or the fact that he’d been caught smoking in Conyer’s yard, or both. He looked for somewhere to put out the cigarette. He didn’t want to drop it. Finally he settled for lifting the sole of his left shoe and stubbing the butt out on the leather. It left a scorch mark. He would have to hide the shoe until he found time to get new soles made. His wife would wonder what a reformed smoker was doing stubbing out cigarettes on $300 shoes. Morland took the butt from him and put it in his now empty pack.

‘Don’t be,’ said Conyer. ‘It is at the root of all that we do here, all that we’re trying to protect. We are not like the Backers, and their god is not like our god. Theirs is a wicked god, an angry god.’

‘And ours?’ said Morland.

He saw Warraner standing on the porch steps, watching them. Behind him, two figures waited in the hallway.

Hayley Conyer laid a gentle hand on Morland’s forearm. It was a peculiarly intimate gesture, equal parts consolation, reassurance and, he recognized, regretful dismissal.

‘Ours,’ she said, ‘is merely hungry.’

The wolf had found the meat: a slab of bloody venison haunch. He circled it, still wary despite his need, but at last he could no longer resist.

He took two steps forward, and the trap snapped shut upon his paw.

36

Founded in 1794, and located on the shores of Casco Bay where the Androscoggin River flowed into the sea, Bowdoin College was routinely ranked among the top colleges in America. Its list of alumni included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the explorer Robert Peary, and the sexologist Alfred Kinsey. Unfortunately, it did not appear to include Prosperous’s own Pastor Warraner. An early morning call to the Office of Alumni Relations produced no record of a Michael Warraner among its former students, and a similar inquiry left at Bangor Theological Seminary also drew a blank.

While I was still sucking on a pencil and trying to figure out why Warraner would bother to lie about something that could so easily be checked, I received a follow-up call from a secretary at Bowdoin. Apparently one of their associate professors was interested in meeting with me. He was free that afternoon, in fact, if I could find the time to ‘pop up’ to the college.

‘Did he really say that?’ I said.

‘Say what?’ said the secretary.

‘“Pop up”?’

‘That’s how he speaks. He’s from England.’

‘Ah.’

‘Yes. Ah.’

‘Please tell him that I’d be delighted to pop up.’

Somewhere in Bowdoin’s Faculty of Religion, the name ‘Warraner’ had set a small alarm bell ringing.

* * *

Professor Ian Williamson looked exactly how I always believed most academics should look, but rarely did: slightly disheveled – but not so much as to raise too many concerns about his mental well-being – and fond of waistcoats and varieties of tweed, although in his case the potential fustiness of the cloth was offset by his choice of Converse sneakers as footwear. He was youthful, bearded, and cheerfully distracted, as though at any moment he might catch sight of an interesting cloud and run after it in order to lasso it with a piece of string.

As it turned out, Williamson was a decade older than I was, so clearly the academic life agreed with him. He’d been at Bowdoin for more than twenty years although he still spoke like a weekend visitor to Downton Abbey. Frankly, if Professor Williamson’s accent couldn’t get him laid in Maine, then nothing could. He specialized in Religious Tolerance and Comparative Mystical Traditions, and his office in the lovely old faculty building was filled equally with books and assorted religious bric-a-brac, so that it was somewhere between a library and a market stall.

He offered me coffee from his own personal Nespresso machine, put his feet up on a pile of books and asked me why I was interested in Michael Warraner.

‘I could ask you the same thing,’ I said, ‘given that he doesn’t appear to be one of your alumni.’

‘Ah, fencing,’ said Williamson. ‘Right. I see. Excellent.’

‘What?’ I said, not seeing.

‘Fencing.’ He made a parrying gesture with an imaginary foil, and accompanied it with a swishing noise, just to make certain that I got the picture. Which I didn’t.

‘Sorry, are you challenging me to a duel?’

‘What? No. I meant verbal fencing – the old thrust and parry. Philip Marlowe and all that. I say, you say. You know, that kind of thing.’

He stared animatedly at me. I stared less animatedly back.

‘Or perhaps not,’ said Williamson, and a little of his enthusiasm seemed to leach away. I felt as though I’d kicked a puppy.

‘Let’s say that I’m curious about Prosperous,’ I said. ‘And I’m curious about Pastor Warraner. He seems like a strange man in an odd town.’

Williamson sipped his Nespresso. Behind him on his otherwise empty desk I noticed a trio of books with their spines facing toward me. All related to the Green Man. It couldn’t have been a coincidence that they were displayed so prominently.

‘Michael Warraner entered Bowdoin as a liberal arts student when he was in his mid-twenties,’ said Williamson. ‘From the start, it was clear that his focus was on religious studies. It’s a demanding regimen, and tends only to attract students with a real passion for the subject. A major consists of nine courses, a minor five, with two required: Introduction to the Study of Religion, or Rel. 101, and Theories about Religion. The rest are comprised of various options from Asian Religions, Islam and Post-Biblical Judaism, Christianity and Gender, and Bible and Comparative Studies. Clear enough?’