by Phil Rickman
As she followed Lol across the yard, a sensor switched on two lamps projecting from the stable wall, revealing the cottage in front of them. She could see it had originally been quite small, a typical Herefordshire farmworker’s timber-framed home: two up, two down and a lean-to. There was a brick extension, probably nineteenth century, longer and taller than the original dwelling.
‘Just the four bedrooms at present.’ Lol had a long key for the cracked and ill-fitting front door. ‘But there’s scope for conversion of a few more outbuildings, if Prof can get listed-building consent.’
Merrily thought that with David Shelbone around this could turn out to be more of a problem than Prof might figure.
Unexpectedly, she discovered she was starting to feel less depressed. It was clear that the case of Gerard and Stephanie Stock had several dark and, as yet, unprobed levels, was more complex than either the police or even she had imagined and went deeper than a violent rage inflamed by a botched Deliverance.
If she could be convinced of this, it was a start. She wouldn’t be able to live with herself – as an exorcist, a priest or a person – if she thought anything she’d done had led, however indirectly, to the slaughter of Stephanie Stock.
‘It’s a nice idea, in principle,’ Lol was saying. ‘Musicians can come and stay, no real time limit, and help out generally around the place when they’re not recording. Van Morrison on orbital sander – that’s yet to happen, but people will do all kinds of things for Prof.’ He pushed open the front door and put a hand inside, feeling around for light switches. ‘This is the living room. It’s still a bit, er…’
Merrily stepped inside, looking around by the harsh light of two naked bulbs. She saw several wooden packing cases, a bubblewrap mountain, an inglenook full of CDs, a TV set on a tea chest, two deckchairs and one padded garden recliner in the middle of an ice floe of polystyrene packing.
‘Lol, this is a dump.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s, er… that’s one way of—’
‘It’s the only way, Lol.’
‘The bedrooms are tidier,’ Lol said.
Which was true. Merrily chose the smallest of them, which contained just a tiny porcelain washbasin, a rag rug and a bed. It was in the old part of the cottage but had recently been done up – fresh plaster between the beams. The three-quarter bed had no headboard, but there was a new duvet lying on it, still in sealed plastic.
It was stuffy in here. ‘It was supposed to be my room.’ Lol prised open the window – one pane, eighteen inches square. ‘But for some reason I keep going back to a camp bed in one of the lofts over the stable.’
Yes, he would do that; he’d need the feeling of impermanence.
Merrily sat on the bed. She felt like an asylum seeker in a hostel; tomorrow seemed as impenetrable as Prof Levin’s living room.
‘Hang on a minute.’ Lol went off and came back with a small wooden reading lamp with a parchment shade. He placed it on the deep window sill and plugged it into a socket underneath. With the ceiling bulb switched off, the lamp turned the room a hazy buttermilk. Monastic cell to cosy boudoir in two clicks.
Lol asked if could bring her up a drink. ‘Probably better if you didn’t see the kitchen tonight.’
‘Bad?’
He shrugged. ‘The rats live with it.’
‘Is there a kettle, say, and a teapot that we could perhaps bring up?’
‘Sure.’ He was hovering in the doorway. ‘I’ll… fetch your case in, then?’
‘You want some help?’
Lol held up both hands. ‘Stay. Luxuriate.’
She spread the duvet on the bed and sat down again, staring at the rough plaster. She and Lol had shared some secrets again. She wondered if he still had the sweatshirt with the Roswell alien motif.
With Lol, it all went back to a teenager called Tracy who had a mate called – Kath, was it? Karl Windling, the aggressive and unpleasant bass-player in Hazey Jane, had fancied this Kath and set Lol up with Tracy – she was about four years younger than Lol, but you probably wouldn’t have known, seeing the two of them together, and he certainly wouldn’t have suspected. And then Windling had decided he wanted Tracy as well, and it had all turned nasty, and Windling had squirmed out of it, leaving Lol – innocent in everyone’s eyes but the law’s – with a conviction for having sex with an under-age girl, six months’ probation and rejection by his family.
That was the start of it. A long time ago. A long time for anyone to remain an alien. But it would partly explain his reaction, both times, to Stephanie Stock.
* * *
‘You must have thought she was unreal… a ghost.’
‘I’d’ve been happier with a ghost.’ Lol put down the tea tray.
Merrily thought back to his involvement with the ethereal Moon, who’d lived on Dinedor Hill. ‘It’s like cats, isn’t it?’
‘Cats?’
‘Put a cat in a room with someone who’s afraid of cats or allergic to cat hair, the cat invariably heads straight for them, jumps onto their laps.’
‘I like cats.’
‘Well, I know that. And you quite like women, too – I realize this is an inexact analogy. I’m talking about women with problems. Weird women. They tend to come on to you like cats. And you put out a tentative hand, and then experience tells you to back off.’
‘I’m not proud of backing off.’
‘I don’t like to imagine what might have happened if you hadn’t.’ Merrily poured the tea. ‘Could she have been stoned?’
‘Or was she ill?’ Lol wondered.
‘What? Something long-term? Schizophrenia? Could that have been why Stock kept her apart from the community? Was he drinking to excess to cope with it? The mad woman in the isolated kiln? But you can’t really do a Mr Rochester these days, can you? You can’t keep this kind of thing secret any more – if she was on medication, for instance… and schizophrenics are almost invariably on medication.’
‘And she apparently went out to work.’
‘Yeah, but did she?’
‘She said she was temping for a car-dealer in Hereford.’
‘But was she?’ Merrily leaned her head against the side of the bed. ‘All this will have to come out.’ She looked at Lol. ‘That night in the hop-yard – was she aware of you?’
‘Yes.’ Lol drank some tea. ‘And no.’
‘Good answer. Helpful.’
‘It was dark.’
‘She was aware of you in the bedroom, though. And she was certainly aware of you downstairs before we began.’
‘Well… coming on to me like I used to be this big rock star – what kind of crap was that? She’d probably never heard of me until Stock mentioned I was staying at Prof’s. But she gave absolutely no sign of recognizing me from the hop-yard. Not then, anyway.’
‘But you recognized her?’
‘Wasn’t sure at first. Not till we were upstairs together and she was on the bed and you and Stock had gone… and then suddenly she was.’
‘Because of the hop-bine?’
‘The Lady of the Bines? Who never existed? Who is an invented ghost?’
‘Remind me about that again.’
Merrily lit a cigarette; she’d smoked it by the time he’d finished.
‘So the museum woman made it up. You been back to ask her, Lol?’
He shook his head.
‘Hops.’ Merrily tapped the tea tray with her fingertips. ‘Think hops.’
‘Hop-pillows? Stock said hop-pillows were supposed to give you a better night’s sleep. But not in this case.’
‘Hops as a turn-on? The first time you saw her, she was naked and winding a hop-bine around her. And up in the bedroom, she was playing with an old hop-bine again – a hop-bine, which she was again using in a… lubricious fashion. How did you feel?’
‘Embarrassed. Scared.’
‘And maybe just a bit…?’
‘I’ll stick with scared and embarrassed.’
‘Basic nymphomania?’ Mer
rily wondered. ‘That can be a mental illness, can’t it? I mean, people have a good laugh about it. Men in pubs always like to pretend they wish their wives would catch it, but it’s a mental illness, isn’t it?’
Lol considered. ‘I don’t even think it’s a clinical term. There are no criteria to back it up. It’s applied to women who want “too much sex” – but how much is too much? And what do you call a male nymphomaniac? Could be a purely sexist term, because a woman who lives for sex is a slut, while a man who can’t get enough is a role model.’
‘Wow,’ Merrily said, ‘you really have been on a course.’
He looked uncomfortable at that. He pulled off his glasses and began to polish them on the hem of his T-shirt. Merrily slid down to the rug and leaned back against the side of the bed, her bare arms around her knees. She was aware of the irony of being alone in a bedroom talking about sex with a man she’d always found attractive, but in circumstances that rendered the whole subject forbidding. Like going into a tobacconist’s to discuss emphysema.
‘We’re going round in circles, Lol.’
He told her about the odd words uttered by Stephie in the bedroom, the foreign language which definitely wasn’t French, might have been Welsh. And then Don’t say no to me…
‘As if someone else had been saying no to her? Well, Stock’s a lot older than she was and probably close to being an alcoholic, which—’
‘—is no cure for impotence,’ Lol said. ‘And I think I’m right in saying the number one reason for men killing their wives is being drunk and on the receiving end of taunts about not being able to perform. And Stock’s an arrogant guy. Very, very hard for someone like that to admit to sexual inadequacy. And if he doesn’t say another word to explain why he did it, that’s probably what they’ll put it down to.’
‘If,’ Merrily said heavily, ‘there hadn’t also been what they will insist on describing as an exorcism.’
They were both silent. It occurred to Merrily that she might have done rather better if Lol had accompanied her as a psychologist, part of her putative Deliverance team.
He stood up and leaned against the window sill next to the lamp. ‘How about if I go back to Bliss and tell him about Stephanie?’
She looked up at him. ‘You’d hate to have to do that.’
‘It might alter the direction of their inquiries. And it’s the truth.’
She went and stood next to him. ‘They wouldn’t believe you.’
‘You did.’
‘Also, Howe would take enormous pleasure in bringing up your… past record.’
He smiled. ‘Hazey Jane Two?’
They looked at one another; she saw his face soften. It was the kind of confluence of gazes that might normally have progressed rapidly to a meeting of mouths.
But the moment passed, and Merrily went and sat on the bed.
‘Call this a vague guess,’ she said, ‘but it’s my feeling that if there’s one person who could explain much of this, it’s Simon St John.’
Lol used a phone plugged into the wall next to Prof’s garden recliner. The call was answered in seconds.
‘Who’s this?’
‘It’s…’ He always found it hard to identify himself. ‘It’s Lol.’
A sigh. ‘Sorry, mate. Thought you were the media. About to tell you to fuck off.’
‘You said that to the papers?’ He really didn’t care, did he? What must it be like not to care? ‘Had many calls tonight?’
‘Not as many as I expected.’ Simon sounded tired, though, like he’d been doing a lot of talking.
‘But the police have been round?’
‘Briefly.’
Lol said, ‘So you know everything.’
‘This is the English countryside,’ Simon said. ‘Everybody within a six-mile radius knew everything by teatime.’
‘You don’t sound surprised.’
‘I’m getting over it.’
‘The thing is,’ Lol said, ‘Merrily Watkins is here.’
‘Good for you.’
‘It’s not looking good for her.’
‘I can imagine.’
‘We thought you might like to talk. Now… or tomorrow morning? There’s quite a lot to—’
‘No, there isn’t,’ Simon St John said curtly. ‘It’s over. Let the police sort it out.’
‘Hang on, how can you—?’
‘It’s over, Lol.’
The vicar hung up on him.
The old pine door of Lol’s loft opened on to a rickety wooden gallery directly above the mixing board, overlooking the studio floor – moonlight now falling through the skylight on to snaking cables and the Boswell guitar on her stand.
It must have been after three a.m. when he came out and stood there, leaning on the basically unsafe rustic railing. Times like this when you smoked a cigarette. Maybe he should start, if only to get through the nights.
He’d just dreamed of the Lady of the Bines again, weaving and rustling towards him, and this time she was a ghost and she came in a shroud of cold, and her eyes were like smoke, and Lol had shuddered awake.
He stood on the gallery – the minstrel’s gallery, Prof called it – and thought about Merrily, lying no more than forty feet away, thought about how close he’d come to kissing her. Clearly it just wasn’t meant; as she’d pointed out herself, only weird cats jumped into his lap.
And although he thought about her every day, only negative circumstances had ever brought them together, and even then… He was aware that tonight they’d attempted to analyse his experiences but hadn’t even touched on hers: whatever had happened to her in the kiln, whatever it was that had made her appear to choke, sent her dashing around the place flinging open doors.
It’s over, Simon St John had said. Was it?
Was Gerard Stock lying awake in his cell at Hereford Police Station, going back over the day, screening the movie? Lol tried to see that movie – Stock, still angry after showing Merrily the door, walking in on Stephie… Don’t say no to me… Predatory Stephie. Gerard Stock imploding, like an old radio blowing all its valves.
It struck Lol that Stock could still virtually walk away from this. Only in exceptional circumstances these days did the perpetrators of hot-blooded domestic murders get life. A domestic killing was a one-off, the killer no danger to the public. In this case, the killer had been under massive stress, heightened by an exorcism that hadn’t worked.
It could, in the end, be Merrily who came off worst. A career wrecked. More than a career, a calling.
It’s over.
In the hour before dawn – the only way to cool the fever of his thoughts – Lol wrote a song and, as the sun came up, sat in the shadows of the booth with the Boswell guitar and played it through, complete.
It even had a title: ‘The Cure of Souls’.
27
Scalding
AS SHE OPENED her eyes, a shaft of sunlight from the one small window threw her back into the kiln-house. She tasted sulphur, heard the shrill, cold calling: beep… beep… beep… beep… invoking dead Stephie, racked with laughter. I think you’d better answer that, vicar. It might be God!
She clawed around the bare boards for the mobile. ‘Yes?’
‘Merrily?’
‘Sophie…’ She sat up in the bed – no headboard: stone and rough plaster against her back and shoulders, dungeon-like. ‘Where are you?’
‘I’m in the office, of course. Are you alone?’
‘I’m in bed. Yes,’ she said, ‘I’m alone.’
‘I have the morning papers here.’
‘Oh. Do I want to know this?’
‘Gerard Stock was charged last night with the murder of Stephanie Stock.’
Merrily closed her eyes.
‘I think that for you we can take that as a…’ Sophie hesitated. ‘I was about to say reprieve.’
‘Think the phrase is “stay of execution”.’ Merrily fumbled for her cigarettes. ‘What do they actually say?’
‘It’s made page
one in the Mail and the Telegraph. All the reports identify the Stocks as people who complained that their home was haunted, and how it was the site of the murder of Stewart Ash. Nowhere, I’m relieved to say, is there any mention of an exorcism taking place, although the Telegraph reminds us you’d voiced an intention of looking into the problem. I would think that they’ve said all they consider themselves allowed to say until after the trial.’
‘Which, since he’s confessed, may be not too many months away.’
Sophie said calmly, ‘Has he?’
‘What?’
‘Confessed.’
‘He was the one who called the police.’ Merrily tried to grip a cigarette between lips that felt slack and rubbery.
‘But you don’t know if he’s made a formal statement, do you?’ Sophie said. ‘We may not even find out. He’ll probably be shipped off to a remand centre, if he hasn’t gone already.’
‘Well… it means I’m back in circulation, at least.’ Merrily looked around the tiny monk’s cell and felt a small pang of regret. Safe haven. Sanctuary. ‘For the present.’
‘Ah,’ Sophie said. ‘About that. I’ve… spoken briefly to the Bishop at his hotel in Gloucester. He feels, as I do, that – since we’ve already told several people that you’re away on holiday – perhaps it would be best if you were to remain away. For a week, at least.’
‘What about the parish?’
‘That’s all been arranged. A locum’s been organized for the Sunday services, if you agree. It’s the ubiquitous Canon Beckett, I’m afraid. Jeffrey Kimball’s back in Dilwyn tomorrow, so the Canon’s available again.’
‘Oh.’
‘I imagine DCI Howe will need to talk to you again, but I wouldn’t make the first move there if I were you. I’d keep your head well down.’
‘What’s Bernie’s attitude?’
‘Guarded,’ Sophie said.
‘That’s a useful word.’
‘And there’s something else. Someone else wants to see you. I pass this on now, but I’ve also told him you’re going away.’
‘Who?’
‘Mr Shelbone. David Shelbone. Perhaps you could talk to him on the phone, if you must.’
