Chapter 1

Do you find that in the phantasm of memory, places are larger than their physical reality? That a set of walls, columns, ceiling or windows, surface in your mind then tower over you like a Sphinx, contemplating you with entrenched superiority? History grows on places like a fungus until they have eyes of their own, a secret soul, a hidden murmur.

I can still feel the invasive pollen in my nose from the orchids in the chancel. On a bright day, the sun would turn stained glass faces, robes, angels, saints, skies and disciples of every shade and hue into a bewitching seduction. In my mind's eye, I walk slowly down the nave of my old friend, enemy and companion. As ever my tentative footsteps, light as they are, make the empty church certain to betray me; each step lets the watchful air cry out my presence, from the slow deep thud of my boot heel to its chorus of echoes rippling like alarm bells off the aisles to the chancel, through the transept arches and back to the nave again. Funny how it always seems louder the slower you walk. It is a comforting sound, but only when you know you are alone, and always loudest when you desperately need to be invisible.

I look up. The old beams are of pale timber, like the revamped floor, thanks or no thanks to council-funded refurbishment rather too garish for a church this age. Authentic in swerving elegance, those beams are insulted by walls of cheap white paint, where the original Renaissance stone claws its way back through the papery layer in grey patches and cracks, glaring at the modern floor as if to spit on it. I take comfort in that, too.

I was a curious sort of girl, I suppose. As long as no one watched me, this building, the stained glass and meditative echoes, were all mine. As a child I was granted the freedom to play solo games, imaginary adventures or hide and seek with myself, running up and down the aisles, finding secluded shadows in and out of the transepts, usually hiding from my elderly aunts behind the arcade pillars, my trusty allies.

Aunts Pam and Alison would spend ages at a time chatting with Ministe