by Phil Rickman
When she switched the light back on, nothing seemed any clearer and it was eleven-thirty. She called Huw Owen, who never seemed to sleep.
‘I tossed the coin,’ she told him eventually. ‘It came up tails. Twice tails: no spiritual interference, no unquiet spirit.’
‘And how did you feel, lass?’
‘Weird.’
‘Come on, talk grown-up, eh?’
‘Sorry. I felt separation. Transcendence. Little me, big God. Plus, I was in there all night, but it felt like… not so long.’
‘How long?’
‘Six hours felt like – I don’t know – less than two. And you don’t fall asleep on your knees, do you?’
‘Contraction of time, eh?’
‘And it was… profound, moving, exalting – all that stuff. But I’m trying not to get carried away, because somehow it didn’t tally with what happened afterwards, out here in the material world. It’s not been a great day for me, Huw.’
‘Bugger me.’ She heard him drawing in a thin breath, like the wind through a keyhole. ‘You’re still expecting God to make it easy?’
‘I should scourge myself, put Brillo pads in my underwear?’
‘What I’m thinking, Merrily,’ Huw said reasonably, ‘is if you were in the church all last night, you should be getting some sleep. Just a thought.’
‘I grabbed an hour or so earlier. Look, I’ve got a kid who tried to kill herself. What can I do?’
‘Nowt. Let this Dennis pick up the mucky end of the stick for a change. Hang back, see what transpires.’
‘What transpires? Hasn’t enough bloody transpired?’
‘The girl’ll be safe in hospital for the time being.’
‘And what about Layla Riddock?’
‘Aye,’ he said, ‘there’s your problem, looks like. But we’re not the police. And even if we were, what’s she done wrong?’
‘Apart from terrifying old ladies and driving a little girl to the point of suicide as an act of pure vengeance?’
‘All right, it’s a tough one,’ he admitted. ‘Needs thought, prayer.’
‘Or the toss of a coin?’
‘Get off to bed, Merrily,’ Huw growled.
She lay in bed, with Ethel the cat in the cleft in the duvet between her knees. She slept eventually. She dreamed, over and over, that the phone was ringing. She dreamed of a withering foetus inside her and awoke, sweating, and then closed her eyes, visualizing a golden cross in blue air above her, and slept again and awoke – something coming back to her from the night in the church. And she thought, Justine?
Awakening, stickily, into blindingly mature sunlight and the echoey squeak-and-clang of the cast-iron knocker on the front door.
Panic. Jane would be late for—Stumbling halfway downstairs, dragging on her towelling robe before she realized there was no Jane to worry about. The knocking had long stopped; she didn’t know how long it had been going on, and now the phone was shrilling. She dragged open the front door, and found nobody there. She ran through to the scullery, saw she’d left the anglepoise lamp on all night, and grabbed the phone.
‘Oh. I was begining to think you’d left already.’
‘Sophie—? Oh God, what time is it?’
‘It’s just gone eight. Are you all right?’
‘Er – yeh. Sorry, I… Late night.’
‘You haven’t forgotten Mr Stock?’
‘Mr S—?’
‘The haunted hop-kiln,’ Sophie said. ‘You’re due there by nine, remember? I made an appointment for you?’
‘Oh shit…’
‘Merrily, I was ringing to warn you that we’ve had more calls from the press. The People asked if they could be there – exclusively – for the exorcism. We said on no account. We also declined to confirm that there was going to be an exorcism. Also, more alarming as far as the Bishop was concerned, the religious affairs correspondent of the Daily Telegraph—’
‘Did you know Amy Shelbone had tried to kill herself?’
‘What?’
‘Consequently, I need to speak to both the Shelbones. I think I’ve finally got some idea of what it’s about. Now, obviously they’re not going to want to speak to me, after what—’
‘Is the child all right?’
‘I think so. I don’t know. I haven’t had—’
‘I’ll talk to them. I’ll arrange something if I can. Merrily. Meanwhile… I hate to do this over the phone, and I did try to reach you last night but you were constantly engaged… I have to tell you the Bishop would like you to expedite this hop-kiln thing with the minimum fuss and the minimum publicity. He doesn’t want it dragged out. He doesn’t want to see you walking out of there into a circus of flashbulbs and TV lights.’
‘Sophie, it’s not that big a story.’
‘His exact words, as I recall, were… “Tell her to throw some holy water around and then leave by the back door.” ’
‘Put a bottle in the post and do the rest down the phone, shall I?’
‘He’s nervous, Merrily. Since the Ellis affair, where Deliverance is concerned, he’s been like the proverbial cat on hot bricks. Rarely a day goes by when he doesn’t ask me if we have a shortlist yet, for the panel.’
‘Meaning he doesn’t quite trust me.’
‘He’s nervous,’ Sophie repeated. ‘And once he finds out about this attempted suicide, he’s going to be very nervous indeed. Fortunately, he’s leaving at ten for a three-day conference in Gloucester. Transsexuality in the clergy. Should absorb his attention for a while.’
‘Three days?’
‘This year alone, surgery has increased the number of female clergy in Britain by four,’ Sophie said dryly.
‘I need to speak to Simon St John, obviously. I trust he’s not in the operating theatre.’
Sophie made a small noise indicating it wouldn’t surprise her unduly. ‘I shall call him and tell him you’re on your way. Just… go.’
‘I’ll call you when it’s over,’ Merrily said. ‘Whatever the hell it turns out to be.’
18
Lightform
‘AND THIS IS where…?’
‘You’re standing on it,’ Mr Stock said.
Although a despicable shiver had started somewhere below her knees, Merrily made a point of not moving.
‘The police, it seems, don’t operate a cleaning service,’ he said. ‘So we could hardly avoid knowing precisely where it was.’
They were standing, just the two of them, on stone flags in the circular kitchen at the base of the kiln-tower. The place had a churchy feel, because of its shape and its shadows. The light was compressed into three small windows, like square port-holes, above head height – above Merrily’s, anyway. And it was cold. Outside, July; in here, November – what was that about?
It’s about doing your job, isn’t it? It’s about not prejudging the issue on second-hand evidence.
She let the shiver run its course, let it sharpen her focus.
She’d driven over here with a head full of Amy Shelbone and Layla Riddock and Jane – everybody but Gerard Stock, whose problem had been devalued because he was allegedly a professional conman, a manipulator, a spin-doctor.
And then you walked out of a summer morning into this temple of perpetual gloom, and it came home to you, in hard tabloid flashes, that a man had actually been beaten to death, in cold blood, right here where you were standing, his face, his skull repeatedly crunched into these same stone flags.
Violent death would often have psychic repercussions; you knew that.
Then there was Gerard Stock himself – bombastic, bit of an operator, possible drink problem. This morning Gerard Stock was wearing a clean white shirt and cream-coloured slacks. His hair was slicked down and his beard trimmed. The impression you had was that Mr Stock had bathed this morning in the hope of washing away the weariness in his bones, changed into clothes that would make him feel crisp and fresh. But the weariness remained in his bleary eyes and the sag of his shoulders.
&n
bsp; If this was an act, he was good.
‘There are… two different versions of the story.’ He was standing with his back to the cold Rayburn stove that sat on a concrete plinth, probably where the old furnace had once been. His voice was as arid as cinders. ‘The prosecution’s submission was that Stewart had been in bed upstairs – alone – when the boys broke in.’
‘Boys?’
‘Glen and Jerome Smith, nineteen and seventeen. Travellers. Members of their family had been helping Stewart with his research into the links between the gypsies and the Frome Valley hop farms. He’d bought the boys drinks in the Hop Devil, paid them also in cash for their “research assistance” – mainly a question of finding Romanies who were willing to talk to him. But, according to the prosecution, the Smiths got greedy, and they came to believe he had a fair bit of money on the premises.’
Merrily looked around. No indications of wealth and no obvious hiding places in a circular room that didn’t seem to have altered much from its days as the lower chamber of a hopkiln. Its walls were of old, bare brick, hung with shadowy implements, non-culinary.
Romantic, maybe, but not an easy place to live.
‘In their defence,’ Mr Stock said, ‘the Smith brothers told a different story which, to me, has more than a ring of truth. It certainly didn’t do their reputation any favours. Basically, they admitted visiting poor old Stewart on a number of occasions at night to… administer to his needs.’
‘You mean sexual,’ Merrily said. ‘For money.’
Next to her was a dark wood rectangular table top on a crossed frame which looked as if it had once been something else. A large-format book called The Hop Grower’s Year lay face down on it. On the back of the book was a photograph of the author – small features under grey-white hair so dense it was like a turban. The photo was one of those old-fashioned studio portraits with a pastel backcloth like the sky of another world, and the face brought home to her the reality – and the unreality – of why she was here. For this was him: the kiln-house ghost.
Her first task: to determine whether it was reasonable to believe that some wisp, some essence of this person was still here. Madness. Even half the clergy thought it was madness.
‘… Agreed they’d accepted money several times,’ Gerard Stock was saying, ‘for research and for giving him… hand relief, as it was described to the court. All rather sordid, but gypsies aren’t squeamish about sex. As Stewart pointed out in his book, their society might be closed to the outside world, but it’s very open and liberal when you’re on the inside. Gypsy kids tend to get their first carnal knowledge at the hands of siblings, if not parents. Prudish, they’re not, which is healthy in a way, I suppose – you won’t find many Romanies in need of counselling.’
He inspected Merrily, as if checking how prudish she might be. No way could she align this Stock with the slick PR man described by Fred Potter, the reporter, and hinted at by Simon St John. He was just someone trying to rationalize the irrational, more scared by it than he’d ever imagined he could be. He’d told her frankly that Stewart Ash and he had never got on – Ash always blaming him for leading his niece into a world of ducking, diving and periodic penury.
People will talk to you, as a human being, the Bishop had said, meaning she came over as small and harmless – no black bag.
‘Look… if you want to sit down over there…’ Mr Stock indicated a chair pulled out from the table. ‘I’m afraid Stewart really was found lying with his head almost exactly where your feet are.’
‘I’m OK. Go on.’
‘Well, he was wearing pyjamas. There was a lot of blood. His face was almost unrecognizable. We’ve scrubbed and scrubbed at the flag, but when the sun’s in the right position you can still see the stains distinctly.’
Merrily made a point of not looking down, inspecting the upper part of the room instead. She’d been in hop-kilns before, and couldn’t help noticing how basic this restoration had been – rough boarding fitted where once thin laths would have been spaced out across the rafters, supporting a cloth to hold the hops for drying over the furnace.
‘The Smiths always fiercely denied killing him, insisting, at first, to the police that someone must have followed them in and done it after they’d left.’
‘Any evidence of that?’
‘Of sexual activity? Apparently not. When there was nothing in the forensic evidence, nothing from the post-mortem, to suggest Stewart had recently had sex, they panicked and one of them changed his story – claiming they’d come here to do the business and found him already dead.’
‘That couldn’t have helped them,’ Merrily said.
‘Finished them completely, far as the jury was concerned. Found guilty, sent down for life. They’ve appealed now – every one appeals. Couple of civil-liberties groups assisting. Probably won’t succeed, but I imagine one or two people in the area are getting a touch jittery about it. We certainly are.’ He laughed nervously. ‘If they didn’t do it, who did? It’s one thing to live in a place where a murder was committed; something else to live with the possibility that the murderer’s still out there.’
‘You think that’s a real possibility?’
‘Oh yes.’
He walked over to the wall, pulled down a wooden pole with a slender sickle on one end. Unexpectedly, the crescent blade flashed in the shaft of sunlight from the middle window. Merrily stayed very still as he hefted it from hand to hand.
‘They used these things for cutting down bines. I sharpened it. I thought, they’re not going to get me like they got Stewart. Ridiculous.’ He shuddered, replaced the tool. ‘I just don’t trust the countryside.’
So why hadn’t the Stocks sold the place and got out?
‘I don’t understand. Why would anyone want to get to you?’
‘I—’ He looked at her, as if he was about to say something, then he hung his head. ‘I don’t really know. I just don’t feel safe here. Never have. Lie awake sometimes, listening for noises. Hearing them, too. The country is—’
‘What sort of noises?’
‘Oh – creaks, knocking. Birds and bats and squirrels.’ He shrugged uncomfortably. ‘I don’t know. Nothing alarming, I suppose. Except for the footsteps. I do know what a footstep sounds like.’
‘You’ve actually heard footsteps?’
‘Not loud crashing footsteps echoing all over the place, like in the movies. These are little creeping steps. Always come when you’re half asleep. It’s like they’re walking into your head. You think you’ve heard them, though you’re never sure. But in the middle of the night, thinking is… quite enough, really.’
It wasn’t quite enough for Merrily. ‘What about the furniture being moved?’
He looked up sharply. ‘Oh, we didn’t hear that happen. We had the table over the bloodstained flag – to cover it, keep it out of sight. We’d come down in the morning and find it was back where… where it is now. This happened twice. But we never heard anything.’
‘And you talked about a figure? You said in the paper you’d seen a figure coming out—’
‘Yeah.’ He walked over to the part of the wall opposite the door. ‘Coming out… just here. I said “a figure” because you’ve got to make it simple for these crass hacks – my working life’s been about avoiding big words. But actually it was simply a… a lightform. Do you know what I mean?’
‘A moving light?’
‘A luminescence. Something that isn’t actually shining but is lighter than the wall. And roughly the shape of a person. We’d finished supper… a very late supper; it was our wedding anniversary. And sudenly the room went cold – now that happened, that’s one cliché that did happen. It’s a funny sort of cold, you can’t confuse it with the normal… goes right into your spine… do you know what I mean?’
‘Yes, I do.’ This was, on the whole, convincing. When you thought of all the embellishments he might have added – the familiar smell of Stewart’s aftershave, that kind of stuff…
Merr
ily shivered again, glad she’d put a jacket on – to hide the Radiohead T-shirt, actually. She’d left the vicarage in a hurry – no breakfast, just a half-glass of water – throwing her vestment bag into the boot. Usually, she’d spend an hour or so in the church before a Deliverance job, but there’d been no time for that either.
‘Mind you, it’s so often like a morgue in here.’ Gerard Stock folded his arms. ‘And dark in itself creates a sense of cold, doesn’t it? The living room through there’s no better. That was formerly the part where the dried hops were bagged up, put into sacks.’
‘Hop-pockets,’ Merrily said.
‘Oh, you know about hops?’
‘A bit.’
‘Stewart had absolutely steeped himself in the mythology of hops – not that there’s much of one. He got quite obsessed over something that—I mean, it’s just an ingredient in beer, isn’t it? A not very interesting plant that you have to prop up on poles.’
‘There was a hop-yard at the back here?’
‘Was. The wilt got it.’
‘Is that still happening?’
‘I believe there are new varieties of hop, so far resistant to it. But it happened here.’
‘You said you saw lights out in the hop-yard.’
‘My wife. My wife saw them. I never have. That was the first thing that happened. It was soon after we moved in. Winter. Just after dusk. We’d brought in some logs for the stove, and she was standing in the doorway looking down the hill towards the hop-yard and she said she saw this light. A moving light. Not like a torch – more of a glow than a beam. Hovering and moving up and down among the hop-frames – appearing in one place and then another, faster than a human being could move. She wasn’t scared, though. She said it was rather beautiful.’
‘Just that once?’
‘No. I suppose not. After a while we didn’t—This might sound unlikely to you, but we stopped even mentioning those lights. When far worse things were happening in the house itself, I suppose unexplained lights in the old hop-yard seemed comparatively unimportant.’
