The Cure of Souls mw-4

by Phil Rickman

  ‘But, after a while, I could tell this was fucking the kid up, serious.’

  Merrily gazed over the glass waterfall that was Allan Henry’s home. She thought about getting out, going for a meditative walk around, with a cigarette. Perhaps there was something obvious she was missing.

  ‘Where’s her mother stand in all this?’ she asked suddenly.

  ‘Sandra Henry,’ Sophie said. ‘Sandra Riddock?’

  ‘You know her?’

  ‘Not personally, but she worked for an estate agency where my sister was manager for a while. It was how she met Henry. They were the agents for one of his first shoddy housing estates – twelve, fifteen years ago? She was quite a beauty, apparently. I remember my sister saying that no one knew she even had a child, then.’

  ‘The father was a gypsy, Jane says.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know. But you’re right – I do wonder if Sandra Henry knows what her daughter’s been up to.’

  ‘I wonder if she’s in. I wonder if she’s down there now – on her own. I wonder if Layla’s away, supposedly staying with friends or something equally suspicious.’

  Sophie stiffened. ‘On what basis would we be calling on her?’

  ‘We? Well, me, I’d have to play it straight. I’m a minister of the Church. I’ve just found out my daughter’s been involved in experiments to contact the dead, along with Mrs Henry’s daughter and a girl who attempted suicide. As a priest I’m naturally very worried about that. What’s she going to do, laugh it off, turn me away?’

  ‘You’d be using Jane.’

  ‘I’m not using Jane. Jane didn’t even tell me about it. Dennis did.’

  ‘All right.’ Sophie started the car. ‘Let’s try and find the entrance to the drive. I’m told it isn’t obvious. I won’t say “On your head be it.” It’s both our heads.’

  ‘You’re a mate, Soph.’

  ‘Oh, shut up.’ Sophie pulled into the lane, drove very slowly down the hill. It was very quiet; there were no other houses or farms in the vicinity. No cows or sheep grazed the hill. As far as Merrily could recall, no other vehicle had passed them since they’d stopped.

  ‘Likes his privacy.’

  ‘Evidently.’ Sophie stopped opposite a tarmacked opening on the right. ‘You think this is it?’

  ‘Try it.’

  Sophie drove into the entrance – the deep shade of big forest trees immediately closing over the car. After about fifty yards they came to the perimeter wall with its railings on top, a couple of brick gateposts, eight or so feet high, with metal gates, open. A black sign on the left-hand post decreed, in yellow lettering, NO UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY.

  ‘Probably be security cameras, somewhere,’ Sophie guessed. They passed a small bungalow with a van outside. ‘Staff there, I expect. We supposed to check in, I wonder?’

  ‘Nobody about, anyway. Carry on.’

  On the left was a clearing in the trees. Sophie braked.

  ‘Good heavens. Either it’s a reproduction or a museum piece.’

  ‘Or Layla’s dad’s dropped in.’

  The vardo stood alone. It was crimson and gold, like an outsize barrel organ. It had ornate, gilt-ribbed panels, a porch with side-brackets like golden wheels, and brass carriage lamps. The windows had intricately patterned shutters. The vardo looked immaculate, out of a children’s picture book.

  Really has thrown money at her, Merrily thought. For a couple of seconds she even wondered if Amy Shelbone was in there with Gypsy Layla.

  ‘Too easy,’ Sophie murmured, and drove on.

  After a few yards, the full sky reappeared as the drive widened into a forecourt with three vehicles in it: a Range Rover, a black Porsche Carrera and a small sleek yellow sports car. There was a flight of about five stone steps up to a front door that was about the size and thickness of the one accessing Ledwardine Church.

  A man came down the steps. Merrily got out of the car.

  ‘I’m looking for Mrs Henry.’

  ‘Are you, indeed?’ He wore jeans and an old cheesecloth shirt, open to the waist. Gardener? Handyman? Security?

  ‘This is the right house, isn’t it?’ Merrily said.

  ‘And you are?’

  ‘My name’s Merrily Watkins.’

  He nodded slowly, waiting.

  ‘I just wanted to talk to Mrs Henry on a private matter. I would’ve rung first, but it’s ex-directory.’

  ‘So it is,’ he said. ‘Well, she’s not here.’ He looked her up and down like she might have a set of burglar’s tools under her jacket. ‘Maybe I can help.’ He put out a slow hand. ‘Allan Henry.’

  Kirsty Ryan said she’d first started to get cold feet when she realized that Amy Shelbone had actually not known about her real dad killing her mother until they pulled the spirit scam on her in Steve’s shed.

  ‘Even Layla was surprised how easy she went for it. We’d give her a bit of a spirit message from her ma, and she’d write it all down, like it was tablets of stone, and next day, half-twelve on the dot she’d come scampering across the field, desperate to contact her ol’ lady again – I’m saying ol’ lady, she was just a kid herself when the bastard carved her up. I was getting pissed off with it. I mean, a joke’s a joke, but you don’t let it take over your life.’

  ‘Whose life?’ Eirion asked.

  ‘She needed it as much as the kid by then.’

  ‘Layla?’

  ‘Don’t get the idea she’s playing at this, mate.’ Kirsty pushed a hand through her foxy hair. ‘She’s into the gypsy thing in a big way. Whole shelves of books, wardrobes full of exotic clobber – the veils and the hats and the flouncy skirts. She got crystals and a dozen packs of Tarot cards. She got her own gypsy caravan. She mixes herbs and things. She’ll do you a love token to get the bloke you want – involving locks of your hair and his hair and ribbons and stuff. Calls herself a shuvani, a gypsy sorcerer. Like – OK – once, there was this bloke I fancied and I wanted to know if I was wasting my time, right? Layla’s like, OK, wait for the right time of the month, gimme a Tampax—’

  Jane recoiled. ‘Gross!’

  ‘We make this necklace of beads out of clay and menstrual blood. I was supposed to hang it on the guy’s locker and then if the beads had like dissolved by morning it meant he wasn’t gonner be interested. In the end, I bottled out, threw it away, said somebody must’ve nicked it. I mean – what?’

  ‘She really believes this stuff?’ Eirion said.

  ‘It’s her life, mate.’

  ‘So she didn’t think it was entirely a scam – the spiritualism?’

  ‘It started out that way, like I said. But when it began to work, when the kid’s really gone for it, she’s like, “Oh this is how it happens, this is how it happens.” You know?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘It was like she believed the kid’s ma really was in touch. Now, she believes she’s got the power. All the things she told people at the Christmas Fair, ever since, she’s been like, “Oh, Mrs So-and-So just died, you hear that? I told her she was gonner die!” Going on like that.’

  Jane shivered.

  ‘They’re really cooking, you know, her and the kid. I don’t know how she found out about the murder, I really don’t. But then she reckons a load of other stuff’s coming through that she didn’t know. Layla is very excited, not that you’d know that, if you en’t known her as long as me. Come the holidays, no way does she wanner let go of little Shelbone. That afternoon, after the heavy mob crash into Stevie’s shed and bust us up, I’m like, right, that’s it, you can count me out, sister, I got better things to do. But she’s already making other arrangements.’

  ‘So you haven’t been in contact with Layla since school broke up?’ Jane said.

  ‘She rang me a couple of times. I said I was too busy? Next thing, I hear about the kid chucking up in church – well, nobody knew what that was about except me. I thought, this has gone too far. This is well over the bloody top. Next thing I hear, she’s tried to do away with herself. That’s
spooky, ennit?’ Kirsty stood up. ‘There it is. You got the lot now.’

  Eirion said, ‘You’ve known Layla a long time then?’

  ‘All my life, give or take. We were at the same little school at Eardisley. Course, they weren’t rich then, her and her ma. When Allan Henry come on the scene, he wanted to take her away from Moorfield to some private school, but she wouldn’t go.’

  ‘You never met her father?’

  ‘She never met her father. She used to have like fantasies about him, this mysterious gypsy. He was probably some travelling scrap-metal dealer, but she had him roaming Europe in his romantic caravan, seducing women with love potions and doing the business.’

  ‘The business?’

  ‘The magic. Doing the magic for his friends and cursing his enemies. She got all the books, and whenever there was gypsies in the area she’d spend hours with them. She even went off with the buggers once for two nights, her ma went bloody spare. And then… Oh yeah – she cursed a teacher once. We had this gym teacher at Moorfield, Mrs Etchinson. Gave us a hard time. Gave everybody a hard time – team spirit, all this shit. Layla was never a team player.’

  ‘Cursed her how?’ Jane asked. ‘This was probably before my time.’

  ‘It must’ve been before your time, because everybody knew about it. I dunno what she did. The evil eye, the bad words… grave-dirt in an envelope.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Put it this way – within a few months it was confirmed she’d got multiple sclerosis. Not good for a gym teacher.’

  ‘That takes years to come on,’ Eirion pointed out. ‘She must have had it already.’

  ‘That was what we said,’ Kirsty said. ‘But it does makes you think, don’t it?’

  It didn’t give Jane a good feeling. She stood up, too. ‘What did she do for Steve, to get him to lend her his shed?’

  ‘More what she didn’t do, if you ask me,’ Kirsty said enigmatically. ‘Like being considerate enough not to shrivel his genitals.’

  ‘But she’s still seeing Amy?’

  ‘Look, all I know is, when she rang me she said Amy was coming out to meet her at night. Like really at night – when her parents were in bed. She’d ring Amy on the little phone that Amy kept under the pillow, and Layla would say the word and Amy would be up and dressed and out the front door and Layla would pick her up at the bottom of the lane.’

  ‘Where would they go? I mean she’d need somewhere with a table, to lay all the letters out and—’

  ‘No way,’ Kirsty said scornfully. ‘That is history.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s primitive stuff, now. They got well beyond the glass and the little bloody letters.’

  ‘What’s that mean?’

  ‘You don’t wanner know, Jane.’ Kirsty started to walk away. She looked back over her beefy shoulder. ‘Or, more to the point, I don’t wanner know.’

  33

  Item

  ALLAN HENRY’S SITTING room had one wall that was all plate glass, perhaps forty feet long. It had wide green views across to one of the conical, wooded humps known as Robin Hood’s Butts. Appropriately, according to legend, the Butts had been dumped there by the Devil, making him Hereford’s first sporadic developer.

  ‘And this is your…’ Allan Henry studied Sophie, evidently trying to decide whether she was mother or sister.

  ‘Secretary,’ Sophie said quickly and firmly. She and Merrily were at either end of a white leather four-seater sofa, one of two in the vast snowy room. Under their feet was a pale grey rug with an unusual design – a tree growing through the centre of a wheel.

  Merrily didn’t recall ever seeing Sophie looking more agitated. Sophie wanted out of here. Sophie was Old Hereford to the core; to her this man was the Devil.

  ‘Vicars have secretaries now?’ Allan Henry said.

  ‘Sophie works for the Cathedral,’ Merrily told him.

  ‘And what do you do, Mrs Watkins? Specifically.’

  ‘Erm… official title: Deliverance Consultant. I’m afraid I don’t have a card or—’

  ‘Or a dog collar. So what is a—?’

  ‘It’s somebody who deals with problems of a paranormal nature,’ Merrily said, for once without embarrassment. ‘Used to be Diocesan Exorcist.’

  His eyes widened. ‘They still do that?’

  ‘It’s never gone away, Mr Henry.’

  ‘Well…’ He leaned against the towering brick inglenook, long mirrors either side of it reflecting the greenery. ‘I’m now trying to think if I have a problem of a paranormal nature. Let’s see… when things go bump in the night, I can usually explain it. And although I often have people leeching off me, I wouldn’t call them vampires. Can I offer you both a glass of wine?’ He laughed. ‘That is, can I offer you each a glass of wine.’

  ‘Thank you, but I’m driving,’ Sophie said quickly.

  ‘And I’ll be driving in a short while,’ Merrily said.

  ‘Not even one glass?’

  ‘Not even one between us. Honestly, we don’t have very long. We’ve got a number of parents to see.’

  ‘Oh, parents, is it?’

  His local accent had been planed down to a light burr. He was probably in his late forties. He had strong, lank hair, deep lines tracking down his tanned face from eyes to jaw. A modest beer-belly overhung his jeans, but you had the feeling it was being gradually ironed out.

  ‘So why did you want to see my wife rather than me?’

  ‘We didn’t think you’d be here,’ Merrily said. ‘We thought you’d probably be out somewhere building something.’

  ‘With my bare hands.’

  ‘We all have our fantasies,’ she said, and then realized there were two ways he could take that. Sophie frowned at her. Sophie was sending out the message: Get out now, make some excuse, this is a mistake.

  Allan Henry laughed. He laughed, Merrily was noticing, with a confidence that was almost self-conscious. Maybe he’d had a lot of costly work done on his teeth, was determined to get his money’s worth. Otherwise, she sensed around him a kind of conserved energy. She could imagine him in board meetings, relaxed and expressionless and then jumping on someone without preamble, like a jungle cat. Laughing, maybe.

  ‘Rare afternoon off,’ he said. ‘You were lucky to catch me. And my wife’s away, as it happens. The only parent here is me. A parent from my first marriage, that is. The youngsters live in France now, so I don’t see them very often.’

  ‘Perhaps we’ll come back when your wife’s at home.’ Sophie half rose. ‘It’s nothing terribly pressing.’

  ‘Unless it’s about Layla, of course,’ he said.

  ‘She’s with her mother?’ Merrily asked him.

  ‘I hardly think so. Her mother’s on a cruise around the Azores, with her sister, who was recently widowed, poor woman. Thing is, I don’t think of Layla as a child any more. And she’s my wife’s daughter, not mine. This is about Layla, yes?’

  As he leaned forward, a medallion on a black leather thong swung out from his bare chest. It was clearly made of gold. Engraved on it was the symbol of a wheel.

  ‘Yes,’ Merrily said. ‘It’s about Layla.’

  Sophie sank back in her seat, with a leathery creak that sounded like a cry of pain.

  Jane said, ‘I remember Mrs Etchinson now. It was at one of the prize-givings. She was in a wheelchair. A guest of honour. Everybody was making a fuss over her and she was smiling so much that you thought it must be hurting her, all that smiling. And somebody said she used to be a teacher and she had MS, and I remember thinking, God, she’s so young.’

  She flopped back into the soft leather and felt for Eirion’s hand and squeezed hard, as if to make sure she still could.

  They were parked on the grass outside a farm shop overlooking the Ledwardine valley, the sunlit steeple of her mother’s church poking out of the surrounding orchards like a terracotta rocket.

  ‘Listen, Jane… that’s how they get these reputations,’ Eirion said. �
�They utter a curse and then something like that happens, and everybody conveniently forgets how many curses have been laid on people who go on to have completely trouble-free—’

  ‘It’s the fact that she could even do it!’ Jane could feel tears of anger coming on. ‘Wish illness and misfortune on someone.’

  ‘You never done that, in a fit of pique? Wish that someone would have a bad time?’

  ‘Yeah, but I don’t ever believe it’s gonna have any effect whatsoever, and then I take it back anyway in a couple of minutes. Or a couple of hours. Or before I go to sleep. Whereas Riddock, she believes, like, totally that she can do it… and then she does it. It doesn’t matter whether she gave Mrs Etchinson this awful degenerative disease with the grave-dirt in the envelope or whatever. The fact that she wanted to, that’s just as bad, isn’t it?’

  ‘It comes back on you, though, doesn’t it?’ Eirion said. ‘Karma.’

  ‘Allegedly. But not necessarily in this life.’

  ‘Sounds to me,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘like she needs this kid, Amy, as much as the kid needs her. You know what I mean? She lays a curse and somebody falls ill or dies or something, well… She isn’t really sure, is she? She might like to fantasize, but she knows that’s all it is. But when she sets up this spiritualism scam, then suddenly she’s getting what seem to be real messages from the Other Side.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Trance? Automatic writing? Whatever it is, it’s proof to her that she’s got the power. She’s a medium, now, she’s a shaman. And maybe that’s never happened before, except with this young kid.’

  ‘Who’s so precious she drove her to attempt suicide?’ Jane said.

  ‘What do you want to do, then? It’s getting a bit late, if I’m going to get the car back before nightfall…’

  ‘You’ve got hours yet. But sure, by all means, drop me somewhere.’

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘I’ll think of something.’

  ‘There’s only one thing you can do. You can go home and lay the whole lot on your mum and leave it to her.’ Eirion nodded down at the valley. ‘Stop putting it off.’

  ‘She’ll probably be a bit gobsmacked to see us.’