The Cure of Souls mw-4

by Phil Rickman

  ‘You said.’

  ‘It was a long time before I even started to question whether the stuff in the jug at Mass might possibly not have turned into the actual blood of Christ. Still keeps me awake sometimes. So, what I’m saying… I’m not gonna laugh, you know?’

  ‘Well… Stock gave the impression he thought his place was haunted by the ghost of Stewart Ash. But if you believe it was haunted, maybe you’re not looking at Ash whose murderers were caught. Maybe you’re looking at something that happened there a long time ago but that was never solved at all.’

  Bliss blinked. ‘Something else happened there? Should I know that?’

  ‘Maybe something was left that affected Stephanie more than Stock, because she was a woman. Something that changed her personality.’

  ‘You’re suggesting Mrs Stock was possessed, right?’

  ‘I don’t know if that’s the right word.’

  ‘Tell me,’ Bliss said.

  So Lol actually told Bliss about the Lady of the Bines. About Rebekah and Conrad Lake. Out here, under a full moon, it didn’t sound entirely crazy. While he was talking, a Mercedes drew up and a plump man with a pilot’s case walked past them to the gates without a sideways glance.

  ‘Doesn’t waste any time, does he?’ Bliss commented. ‘Right then. You’re saying that, whatever the truth of the matter, Gerard Stock, notorious piss-artist of this parish, had every excuse for thinking his wife had been… shall we say, infected by the spirit of a woman whose murder had gone undetected.’

  ‘Not only undetected, but undiscovered,’ Lol said.

  ‘This is not uninteresting, Laurence. You think if I went back through the annals of the old Herefordshire force, I might find a reference to this missing gypsy? Not that I’m doubting your word, but it might help to have that bit official.’

  ‘I wish you would.’

  ‘I will, son, no skin off my nose. There, that wasn’t too hard, was it? I get very upset about how nobody wants to talk to us any more in case it gets taken down and used in evidence.’ Bliss patted Lol on the shoulder. ‘See, from Merrily’s point of view, what would need to be shown was that Stock wasn’t just a dangerous mental case who only needed his blue touchpaper lighting – by, say, an unwise exorcism carried out without due forethought, et cetera, et cetera – but in fact an intelligent man forced by circumstances to grapple with possibilities to which he’d not normally have given houseroom.’

  Lol noticed Merrily on the other side of the gate. She was talking to one of the uniformed coppers. She had her shoulder bag and her jacket draped over an arm.

  ‘Looks like this is the bit where I’m called on to fence for a while with Henry’s foxy brief,’ Frannie Bliss said.

  ‘Um, there’s something else.’

  ‘Quick as you can, Lol.’

  ‘It’s likely Stewart Ash had an unfinished manuscript suggesting Conrad Lake as Rebekah Smith’s killer. Also some pictures – photographs – that Lake took of Rebekah, naked, with a hop-bine wound around her… the two most important elements in his life, maybe.’

  ‘Or a sadomasochistic symbol of Mr Lake’s dominance, if she was tied up in the bine, Lol.’

  ‘That too. Anyway, we know Stewart had them in his possession, and that they’ve disappeared. Be interesting to know if the Smith boys did nick them, and if they got a chance to pass them over to someone before they were arrested. I mean, how long after the killing were the boys brought in? Could they have hidden the papers and photos somewhere? Could that stuff still be found?’

  Bliss nodded. ‘All right. I’ll check it out. Might take a day or two, and I might not be able to tell yer even if I do come up wid something, but you’ll know the info’s in good hands. Thanks, son. Anything else you think of, you know where to get me. Leominster or Bromyard, usually.’

  He moved towards the gates. Lol followed him.

  ‘So what exactly… has Howe got planned?’

  ‘Well, it won’t come from her, will it? It’ll come from the Chief Constable.’ Bliss stopped. ‘Not a word, OK? You can tell Merrily, and that’s it.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘I mean it, Laurence. I fuck’n hate this politicking, but I’m not gonna lose me job over it.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Right, this is it. Annie’s suggesting the Chief puts out a press statement on the lines of, if the Church can’t be relied on to police itself on matters of irresponsible exorcism, without psychiatric back-up and the like, then it should be made far more open to legal redress. Words to that effect.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘I only wish it were so, pal.’

  ‘What’s the bottom line?’

  ‘The bottom line, Lol, is that the Chief Constable of West Mercia puts his name behind the suggestion that a priest who performs an exorcism that has unfortunate consequences should subsequently be held legally responsible for those consequences. In this case, for instance, we could even be looking at manslaughter.’

  Merrily came through the gate. She looked worried. She was digging in her bag for a cigarette.

  Lol said, ‘They’d want… that she could actually go to prison?’

  ‘That’s extreme, but,’ Bliss shrugged, ‘this could serve as an important precedent. Chances are nothing’ll come of it – I mean, they repealed the Witchcraft Act, didn’t they? But it’ll certainly make everybody very nervous for a good while.’

  ‘The Church has no balls,’ Lol said. ‘No bishop in this country would ever sanction an exorcism again.’

  He watched Merrily coming towards them, the ruby glow of the cigarette between her fingers. It wasn’t the wider issue that worried him so much as what it would do to her. Prison – OK, unthinkable. But being identified as ‘the precedent’ would, for Merrily, be immeasurably worse.

  The pariah. Goodbye to the clergy, obviously. And then what? He’d never fully come to terms with the awesome concept of her as a curer of souls. But ex-Rev. Watkins, the disgraced former priest – the consequences of that didn’t bear thinking about.

  He couldn’t tell her. He had to do something.

  ‘As Father Flanagan used to say to us when we missed mass,’ Frannie Bliss winked, without humour, acquired an Irish accent, ‘ding-ding, and there’s another round to the Devil.’

  42

  Witch Trials

  THERE WAS A screen behind the altar in the Barnchurch. Not a rood screen but the sort of concertina thing women used to toss their robes over in Victorian bathrooms.

  The grey-white figure was hanging from this screen like a giant moth.

  Jane stayed back. The face was chipped and grotesque: the face of a black, dress-shop dummy, greasy white rings smeared around the eyes.

  ‘People touch her clothes, usually,’ Layla Riddock said, weaving in the candlelight, ‘for healing.’

  Jane recalled Kirsty: Gypsies got their own virgin – like a patron saint or a goddess – the Black Virgin.

  ‘Sara,’ Layla Riddock said carelessly. ‘Yes, she helps. Amy’s had so much starchy religion pumped into her that we have to bring her down slowly. Sara’s the Black Virgin, and you can view that two ways, can’t you? A saint or an inversion – or a semi-Christian mother goddess. All ways, she helps. Amy’s finding her true mother. And, through that, her true self.’

  ‘Where is Amy?’ Eirion said.

  ‘Haven’t you taught him any other words yet, Jane?’ Layla tossed her hair. Jane was realizing for the first time how scarily intelligent she was. ‘Watch my lips. I – don’t – know. Perhaps she went home. Perhaps she’s walking the streets. Perhaps she let a rapist in.’

  ‘Don’t,’ Jane shouted, ‘talk like that.’

  … alk like at… The walls sent back the echo. This was a big, empty place, bigger than the average parish church. Layla seemed very much at home here.

  ‘Your mother came to see Allan,’ she said. ‘And me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yesterday. She was with another woman, from the Cathedral, lo
oking for Amy. Didn’t you know?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s funny, because it sounded like someone had told her all about the Steve’s Shed Experience.’

  ‘So?’ Jane had backed up against something low and hard, an old manger.

  ‘Well, that wasn’t a very nice thing to do, grass up your mates, was it? And it caused a nasty little row between me and Allan, making it difficult to get away tonight. I arranged to meet Amy here, but I’m late, and now she’s pissed off. Anything could’ve happened to her. All because you had to blab.’

  ‘What do you expect me to do? My mum was in a hassle with the Bishop, because Amy had laid it all on me. Because she was scared to put you in the frame. What was I supposed to do?’

  Layla shook her head in disgust. The ring in her navel shone like the edge of a coin. Jane was bewildered and furious with herself. How could she have let all this get turned around?

  ‘Anyway,’ she found herself saying petulantly, ‘it was you who set her up.’

  ‘This is Kirsty again, yeah?’

  ‘It’s the truth, though, isn’t it? You hated that family ever since her old man got your fortune-telling act pulled at the Christmas Fair.’

  Layla smiled. ‘Oh, Jane, one forgets, you’re so young…’

  Jane gritted her teeth. ‘Caution, cariad,’ Eirion whispered.

  ‘I’d go to all this trouble for that?’ Layla exploded. ‘For fuck’s sake, what am I?’

  ‘You predicted all kinds of bad stuff. You sent old women home thinking they were going to die—’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, I was pissed! I’d spent a couple of hours in the pub with some guys, then I go back to the school, put on the clobber, and I just couldn’t bear to do all that you-will-come-into-money-and-go-over-the-water shit. So I just let it come through.’

  Jane stared at Layla in her black top and her black jeans standing next to the Black Virgin in her white robes and white headdress.

  ‘I can do this stuff. The dukkering. It’s a mixture of insight and scam. You do the patter, and sometimes the real stuff comes through. But you’re also observing, judging what kind of a punter you’ve got and tailoring your predictions accordingly. But I was pissed, like I say. I mean, you wouldn’t believe some of the people you get in there. There was this old woman, well dressed, dripping with jewellery, all she wanted to know was whether her friend, who was in the hospice, was going to leave all her money to her. You think, that age and all she cares about is more money? I said, yeah, you’ll get the money but you’d better spend it quick ’cause you ain’t got long yourself, dearie.’

  Silence. Jane looked at Eirion. There was a little smile twitching at his mouth.

  Layla chuckled in her throaty way. ‘The one I was a little sorry about afterwards – but, yeah, I said it, sure I said it – was Libby Walker who used to do school dinners part-time. You know Libby? She’s about thirty and she’s got about five kids, all by different dads, and everybody knows she just does it for a council house and the family allowance, that’s how thick and irresponsible she is. And as soon as she came in the booth I could see she’d got another one in the oven, and I just lost patience and told her in this sinister voice that I could see “a withering” in her womb. Course, the stupid bitch went bloody spare.’

  Eirion made a little noise horribly suggestive of amusement, which made Jane blurt out, ‘You cursed Mrs Etchinson!’

  ‘Yeah.’ Layla sighed and fingered the hem of the robe of the Black Virgin.

  ‘Yeah, I did that. I cursed Mrs Etchinson, and Mrs Etchinson had got MS and we didn’t know it, and that was why she was so bloody ratty all the time. I’m sorry. What is this, the Salem witch trials?’

  ‘Layla,’ Eirion said, the Welsh coming out in his voice, ‘can we come back to the Shelbone issue? Whatever you think about Mr and Mrs Shelbone, their dear little daughter has vanished and they’re worried sick. And they’ve been treated pretty abominably at your stepfather’s house – we saw this. First they had their car smashed in by a man with an aggression problem who calls himself a gardener, then your stepfather blatantly lied about it—’

  ‘Oh, Allan’s just a little boy,’ Layla said. ‘Turns peevish if he doesn’t get his own way. Forget all that. He’ll get Douglas Hutton, his lawyer, to fix it – money will change hands, faces will be saved. Allan’s not a bad guy, he’s just a crook, which everybody knows anyway. He needs a gardener on account of so many people want to punch his lights out.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Eirion said.

  Jane wondered if Dafydd Sion Lewis had a gardener, too.

  ‘Look,’ Layla said. ‘Shelbone’s bonkers, and he’s the bane of Allan’s life. He’s this kind of loose cannon. Puts the blocks on lucrative development.’

  ‘That’s necessarily bonkers?’ Jane said.

  ‘From Allan’s point of view, yes,’ Layla said patiently. ‘The situation was that Allan had been after some dirt on Shelbone for years. Unfortunately, although he’s out to lunch, he’s cleaner than the Pope. But some councillor knew about Amy’s origins, and Allan told me, and I admit I got so utterly tired of his constant ravings and his threats to have Shelbone’s brakes seen to, that I thought maybe if Shelbone was already cracking up, like everybody said – maybe we could destabilize his life enough to push him into early retirement or something. No real harm done.’

  ‘So you admit it,’ Jane said.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, I admit it, big deal. I am a bad, bad person. But, then, my old man was a gypsy who conned his way into my ma’s pants and pinched her car and stuff, so it’s in my genes. It’s a hard and ugly world, Jane. Also, Amy was such a pompous little sod that for quite a while it was very much a pleasure, I have to admit. And I had Kirsty, who’s this delightfully amoral creature with no sense of moderation – it was all too funny. But then…’

  Layla went to sit on the altar between the candles. She looked cool and exotic. She didn’t look at all worried, about Amy or anything else. Jane supposed that growing up in Allan Henry’s household kind of emulsioned over your conscience.

  But the really disturbing thing about all this was that the Layla with the cut-off jumper and the navel-ring didn’t really seem such a vicious, evil person. And this weird, echoey half-church, with the grotesque Black Virgin overseeing the proceedings wasn’t the best environment for working out whether this was simply because she could be witchily enchanting and insidiously plausible, or—

  ‘The word is, you’re quite interested in matters of the spirit yourself, Jane. And I don’t mean Church.’

  ‘Er, yeah – kind of…’

  ‘Which, of course, was why I let you into Stevie’s shed. Thinking you could be relied on. Thinking the last person you were going to tell was your old lady.’

  ‘I couldn’t know, could I, that she was going to get called in by the Shelbones, thinking their little girl’s possessed or something?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Layla tucked her legs under the altar. ‘That’s what they would think. Me, I just thought she was a pain. I don’t think any of us could’ve known.’

  ‘Known what?’ Eirion asked.

  Layla glanced at him. ‘He OK with this stuff, Jane?’

  ‘He’s been around me for months.’

  Layla smiled. ‘What none of us could’ve known was that Amy Shelbone is the most—it blew me away.’

  ‘What did?’

  ‘She’s a natural. That kid is the most amazing natural psychic I ever encountered.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘When we did the ouija – and I know how to do this, right? I know how to move the glass and you would never know I’m doing it. Which was what I did. I started it off – and it was like the bloody Internet. I punch in Justine and boom – like a search-engine: “We have forty-six listings for Justine.” You know what I’m saying? All this stuff comes pouring through, and I didn’t have to do a thing, the glass is moving like a bloody piston. Kirsty couldn’t write fast enough. She tell you this?’

  ‘Not t
he way you’re telling it,’ Jane admitted.

  ‘Ah, she’s in denial, is Kirsty. It was just a scam to Kirsty. Beyond that she wasn’t interested. All the time, she wanted to think it was me swinging the glass. I wanted to think it was me. For a couple of weeks, I did think it was me – me as a psychic. I got a little cocky. Then I did it with somebody else.’

  ‘The ouija?’

  ‘Got squat.’ Layla looked down at her feet. ‘Sod-all. Embarrassing. This was at the end of term. Next day, I called Amy, picked her up when the Shelbones were out, and we came here.’ She looked up. ‘Jane, what a blast! We get into Justine, I ask a question, the glass doesn’t move. Won’t move. I couldn’t push it. I ask the question again… Amy starts speaking. Only it’s not her. It’s not the little squeaky I’ll tell my mummy voice; this is grown-up, it’s kind of raunchy – and it’s got this Brummy accent.’

  ‘Oh, wow.’ Jane felt Eirion squeezing her hand. A warning. He was telling her not to take all this as gospel. He was reminding her that Layla Riddock was a notorious manipulator.

  But, like, wow.

  ‘What I’m listening to is a detailed description of a killing. Little Amy Shelbone sitting there in her prim little summer frock, and her mouth’s twisting, spittle on her lips, and this like slurred, bitter voice, going, “I’m gonna cut him this time, I swear, I’m gonna put him away for ever…” ’

  ‘— way for ever,’ the walls sang. Jane dragged her hand away from Eirion’s, shoved it down into a pocket of her fleece.

  ‘So she… like, she really was possessed, then. Mum got it completely wrong.’

  ‘No.’ Layla shook her head briskly. ‘No way. She’s a medium. It’s a different thing altogether. The medium has control. The medium can let the spirit come through and shut it off whenever. Jane, I am psychic. I get insights. A lot of people are, you know that. It’s either in the blood or it isn’t. But it’s nothing I can control. I’ve spent years trying to master it – since I was about twelve. Read hundreds of books, tried all kinds of stuff. And I’m not a medium. I’m just one of a million people who get insights. She made me very jealous, did little Amy.’