by Phil Rickman
‘My advice is to wait. Just see what happens.’
‘No… listen… nothing’s gonna happen if we don’t move now. These old coppers, they’re still living back in the day. It’s like Jimmy Savile – the cops were his mates. He’s shagging everything that moves and, by all accounts, a good few who’ve stopped moving, and the old cops are like, Good old Jim, eh? What a bloody character. Now I’m not saying Charlie…’
‘I’m glad you’re not saying that.’
Annie’s eyes were cold. He’d gone too far. He felt his left eye close, the old numbness easing down like a garden slug from the edge of his forehead. He came away from the door, laid both his palms on the desk.
‘Think about it. What’s best here? Me… or a bunch of ambitious scalp-hunters from another Force?’
‘You know,’ Annie said. ‘That that will never happen.’
60
What to believe
IT WAS INTIMATELY beautiful in the chantry, like sitting inside a richly-decorated stone mushroom, but it didn’t hold too many good memories. This was the scene of her bleakest meeting with Bernie Dunmore. All those questions she hadn’t wanted to ask but had known she’d have to, about his time as a Freemason.
This was where he’d said, I’m going to retire, Merrily. Sitting just there, sweating into his purple shirt. Awful. Leaving her with the persistent fear that she might have had a role in the breakdown of his health.
And now he’d gone, and it felt so much colder in the Cathedral. Even in the gloriously cosy late medieval Chantry Chapel of Bishop John Stanbury. Perhaps even colder in here, and yet…
‘This is one of my places,’ Caroline Goddard said. ‘Been coming here since I was a kid. I feel safe here.’
She’d insisted they talk in the chantry. Anyone could walk in, but nobody would.
They’d met in the Cathedral’s north porch. Caroline’s phone number had the Hereford prefix, 01432, and her voice had the remains of a local accent.
‘I don’t know what I can tell you,’ she’d said. ‘Already, I just want to go home.’
Her voice, as Jane had said, was small and childlike.
It had been a shock to meet her so soon after seeing the woman in the Cwmarrow video with her Pre-Raphaelite hair and what David Vaynor had called her timeless beauty. She was still slim, but her hair was mainly grey now and she’d unwound a white scarf to show that it ended around the collar of her shapeless blue fleece. Her face was unlined but pale; she wore no make-up, no jewellery. She could have been a nun on a solitary holiday.
Wouldn’t say where she lived, only that it was in the city, a flat in a modern block, very central. She said she shared it with a widowed sister. Saying she’d once lived with a man for a while, but it hadn’t worked.
‘This was after Selwyn Kindley-Pryce?’ Merrily said.
‘I never lived with Sel. I spent nights with him. In the early days. Until I couldn’t. Any more.’
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to…’
‘I Googled you. I don’t talk to fans or academics doing a PhD on metaphysical fiction for children or something. I’d instructed my publishers to tell nobody where I lived. But I recognized your name so I Googled you. I’ve always wanted to talk to somebody. But there was nobody who would even understand what I was talking about. Even now I’m not sure…’
She looked up, finding Merrily’s eyes, her expression somewhere between fearful and imploring, Merrily wanting to give her confidence, not yet sure how to go about it.
‘And now I’m afraid. I’m afraid of what’s happening here. You’re an exorcist. You… look a bit young for it.’
‘I’m not that young.’
‘I wanted to talk to you on the phone first, to be sure. And then it started to look like you were dead, too, and I panicked. Too much death.’
Caroline looked down at her hands which were around a small, white prayer book.
‘I get frightened very easily these days.’
But this was the woman who wrote The Summoner. Merrily felt the phone shuddering in her pocket and ignored it.
‘You don’t write for children now?’
‘I write for younger children. Under different pen names. They don’t pay much, books for young children, and you have to write a lot of them, but it keeps my mind fluid. I have the mind of a child, everybody says that, as if it’s a virtue. “She writes through the mind of a child.” Well, that’s all right. You come to accept that it isn’t necessarily good to grow up. Now.’ She turned to face Merrily. ‘Who did die at Cwmarrow, please?’
‘It was a man called Adam Malik. A doctor. He was the sonin-law of Dennis Kellow, who I think you might remember.’
‘The builder. He bought the house, didn’t he?’
‘And was having problems there.’
‘What kind of problems, please?’
‘He had a stroke. Which was preceded by some poltergeist phenomena in the house. And an apparition of a pointing figure. Does that make any sense to you… as someone who lived there?’
‘That’s why you wanted to find me, is it?’
‘It’s my job. I’m trying to help them.’
‘As an exorcist. I read about that. It was on the Internet. My sister works with someone who lives near that house on the estate at Aylestone Hill where the murder was. They said you did a mass there, at night. Is that right?’
‘It was a Requiem Eucharist for someone who had died there. Another example of how the history of a place can affect people living there now. Only I couldn’t find much about the history of Cwmarrow. Except what was in your novel. The Summoner.’
‘I don’t like to talk about that.’ Caroline swung her white scarf back around her throat. ‘It’s not a happy story. I didn’t want to write it.’
‘It… seems to be based on the writings of the medieval chronicler Walter Map. Who doesn’t actually mention Cwmarrow. So it all seems to come back to Selwyn Kindley-Pryce. And you.’
Caroline drew back into the carved stone wall. Stone like the icing on a milky chocolate cake.
‘I was just the writer, you must know that. He wasn’t a writer, he was an academic. He couldn’t find little words for things. Only big words.’
‘He wrote a book called Borderlight…’
‘I wrote that. It was the first book I wrote for him. And I did the drawings, pen and ink, so they’d look like old engravings.’
‘And didn’t he tell stories? Like in the oral tradition?’
‘He still couldn’t write one. Anything he said in his lovely dark brown voice sounded wonderful. He must have wowed everyone in America. But as soon as he tried to write it down, it came out all stilted and pompous. Don’t you believe me?’
‘I honestly don’t know what to believe any more.’
‘You’ve been hurt. I’ve only just noticed. Your face. Was that when the tree fell?’
‘Part of it fell on my car. If I’d been driving slightly faster I might well be dead.’
‘This man who died…’
‘It was an accident.’
‘You think that was an accident?’
‘Put it this way, I didn’t see anyone with a chainsaw.’
Stop it, don’t get clever.
‘If you’re an exorcist,’ Caroline Goddard said, ‘then you must believe in evil.’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘The Summoner taking life to prolong his own. That’s evil, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. Definitely.’
She had a sense of this woman being out on a high ledge and trying not to look down.
‘Was there a Summoner?’
‘There is a Summoner. These things don’t go away. I’ve always known that, since I was a little girl. My dad was a farmer. The kind who sees the countryside as his private factory. Doesn’t see cows, only beef. Doesn’t notice the sunrise over the hills. Never could see what I saw. When I read stories, as a child, about fairyland, I thought I’m living in it. This is fairyland. And my dad – he just wanted me
to help him kill the poor turkeys. I ran away twice and had to be brought back by the police.’
Caroline sat gazing at the triptych over the little altar, the centre picture a Madonna and child with golden haloes. The frame was intricate, wooden and Gothic, with soaring spires.
‘I’d been writing stories all my life. In my head, mostly. I was eighteen when I started sending them to publishers. Stories for children set in the fields I knew. Did the illustrations. I was twenty-two when my first novel was published. Paperback original. That was a magic time. I was living with a boyfriend in a caravan. The publishers asked for a picture of me, and they thought I looked… right, I suppose. They commissioned two more books and by the time I went back to the caravan the boyfriend had gone, so I sold it.’
Never made a fortune, she said, but it was a living wage. Her name was Caroline but not Goddard. That had been chosen for her by the publishers a year before she’d met Selwyn Kindley-Pryce at a fantasy convention. He was not long back from America and they had him as a guest speaker because so many fiction writers used his books for research. He came over and they had a few drinks and ended up spending the night together.
‘He must’ve been – what – thirty years older than you?’
‘It never really occurred to me. I suppose he was the gentle father I never had. Soft-spoken and incredibly fey. Sophisticated, worldly… and yet otherworldly. I was sure he could tune into my thoughts. Yes, I was enchanted, Merrily – can I call you Merrily?’
‘Of course.’
‘A lovely name. A name out of fairy tales. I’m coming to the conclusion that you are a good person. Which is not invariably the case with the clergy. Some of them railed against my books, even before The Summoner, because of the elements of paganism. Well, paganism is colourful and fun, but it doesn’t deal with evil in the same way. That’s why I keep coming back here.’
She looked up at the chantry’s foliate walls and ceiling as if she wanted to hold them tightly around her.
‘So you were writing Kindley-Pryce’s stories… and you were…’
‘I was his lover, but I didn’t live all the time at the Court. I had a little cottage in Dorstone, with my writing room and my studio and my cats. So I was happy to stay there. It was relief from the…’
She went rigid for a moment and then let her shoulders fall.
‘He didn’t encourage me to go and live with him. I don’t think he liked cats. And, to be honest, he… he exhausted me. Physically. Emotionally. I was always exhausted when I came back from Cwmarrow. Whatever form of energy made him into a sort of superman, even at his comparatively advanced age… it was making me feel old before my time. Still in my twenties.’
‘You didn’t like it? The place, I mean.’
‘I loved it, though I’m not sure it loved me.’
‘That’s more or less what Dennis Kellow told me.’
‘Most of all…’ She leaned forward. ‘… I didn’t like the story. Sel planned it, chapter by chapter. My job was to make the characters real and human so they would appeal to young readers. Especially Geraint. All the girls had to love Geraint. That was the key ingredient. He kept throwing pages back at me. “No, no, make him more… exciting.” I said, there are things you can’t say in a book for children, even teenagers. He said, “You’ll find a way”. Am I telling you what you wanted to know, Merrily?’
‘Yes, I think you are. Thank you.’
Caroline smiled.
‘It all started to take on an organic life of its own. Sel believed in it totally because he was a magician, and I had to—’
‘Hang on a sec. When you say magician?’
‘He just was. He could do things that quite scared you,’ Caroline said. ‘You didn’t say no to him. He was gentle at first, but very dominant. I knew I was being controlled. And that seems all right at first, having all your decisions made for you. But it drained you after a while.’
‘Friends of the Dusk?’ Merrily said. ‘Can I ask you about that?’
‘Oh, well…’ Caroline bit her upper lip. ‘I’m not sure what that meant.’
‘Was it just a name for the people who came to the festivals?’
‘I don’t know.’ Caroline looked past Merrily towards the open doorway. Footsteps and voices echoed from the nave. ‘I wasn’t there all the time.’
Caroline was pressing herself into the corner, waiting until the footsteps had receded.
‘There were two kinds of festivals. The public ones, where we’d talk about the books, the Nightlands, and there’d be music. And the others.’
‘The others… young fans would come to them, too?’
‘Young female fans. I believe. And some male.’
‘How would they get there?’
‘All different ways. Some would get the train to Hereford and Selwyn’s son, Hector, he had a bus company, and a bus would bring them to Cwmarrow.’
I get him what he wants.
Thoughts started twisting and curling feverishly like the knots and whorls of the chantry stone. She couldn’t separate them. There was something crucially important here; she wanted to rush out into the open air of the Cathedral Green and chase it down and then come back and put reasoned questions, but Caroline wouldn’t come with her, or wait. She had to go for it now.
‘To what extent was Hector involved?’
‘I don’t really know.’
‘He doesn’t… didn’t like his father, did he?’
‘No.’
‘But he could, quite reasonably, have kept away from Selwyn. Wasn’t as if he’d even known him long. He hadn’t seen him since he was…’
She fell silent. Caroline’s smile had become just a little unearthly.
‘Caroline, tell me…?’
‘People said it was misleading how alike they looked because they were so different – Sel so gentle and Hector so abrupt and aggressive. But they were alike. In other ways.’
‘Women? Girls?’
Caroline’s laughter was hoarse and mirthless.
‘They should all be exorcised. There’s a job for you.’
‘Who?’
‘He needs to be taken out of them. They think they want him. They’re always so excited. They think they’re entering another world, but it’s not what they think it is. It’s his little… dirty world.’
‘Who?’
‘The fans. Lots of them.’
‘What happened at the other events?’
‘I don’t know. I wasn’t there.’
Merrily took in a slow breath.
‘What do you think happened?’
‘I don’t know, but I think it went on happening… after they’d left. He’d found a way in. Maybe he’s still doing it. I don’t know.’
‘From where he is? From Lyme Farm?’
‘I don’t know.’ Caroline looked confused. ‘I think he needs Cwmarrow.’
‘Do you think there’s something… something left at Cwmarrow?’
‘He’s there. When he wants to be. He can be anywhere he wants to be. It’s something he’s always been able to do.’
‘He? Do you mean Selwyn Kindley-Pryce. Or… the Summoner? The maleficus?’
Caroline was hugging herself, shaking. Merrily had never felt closer to the dark heart of the job, felt it pulsing away. Here, in front of an altar, the haloed mother and child. I’m increasingly inclined to think that it’s simply a demand we’ve created, Craig Innes said. Or have – unwisely – allowed to create itself.
‘Caroline, listen, it’s a funny job, mine. You have to consider things that could get you laughed at. Sometimes, I just have to sit for a moment and think, well, I’m a vicar. And there are many thousands of us, and we like to think we work for this huge, benificent supernatural force, and here’s me…’
She stopped talking, aware of Caroline Goddard laughing quietly. Rocking slowly in the old wooden pew, kneading the prayer book inside her woollen scarf. When she looked up, Caroline’s eyes were unblinking.
‘Thi
ng is, Hector can’t get away. He’s been seeing his father all his life.’
‘Seeing?’
‘All his life.’
‘But… Hector was here. His father was in America.’
‘What difference does that make?’
‘Hector told you this?’
‘Selwyn told me. How he’d visit his son. Hector never came near me. He didn’t really like women.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘What are you going to do with this, Merrily, please?’
‘I don’t know.’
She was feeling so very cold, the chantry no longer cosy; its intricate, organic stonework seemed to be flexing like a map of muscles.
‘I suppose I’m going to take advice,’ she said. ‘I’ll try to keep you out of it.’
‘You can tell who you like as long as I don’t have to speak to them. Some people I just can’t talk to, because they don’t believe in anything. They’d think I was mental.’ Caroline looked into the chantry’s small, quite modern stained-glass windows, their colours beginning to dull. ‘I’ll have to go soon. It’s getting dark. My sister’ll be worried.’
‘Why will she be worried?’
‘Because he’s still out there.’ Caroline stood up. ‘The killer.’
Merrily didn’t move, looked up at her.
‘You mean the killer of Tristram Greenaway?’
‘I saw his picture on the TV. I didn’t even know he was back in town.’
‘Tristram?’
Caroline breathed in hard, leaned her back against the richly carved stone and let her breath out slowly.
‘To me, he’ll always be Geraint,’ she said.
61
The cloaked
SHE CHECKED IN at the desk at Gaol Street, but they said Bliss had gone out. It was dark now, all the lights on, a lot more cops around than usual, inside and out. The lights weren’t very bright but they hurt her eyes and she felt very tired and confused and wanted to go home and think about all this. But the DCI was at the door to the stairs.
‘Come up.’
Annie Howe, wearing a dark suit, looking not happy. Leading Merrily up to CID and through to Bliss’s office.
