by Phil Rickman
‘Power’s gone.’
‘Big surprise,’ Dexter said.
He was right; it was bound to happen. Sometimes it only lasted a couple of minutes, but more often three or four hours. And occasionally, in weather like this, two or three days.
Lol switched on the torch. ‘Just hope the phone line’s still up. You want to check that footpath, through the orchard, or call the police now?’
‘En’t your problem. You might as well go home. I’ll call ’em from the bungalow, look.’
‘OK.’ Lol would call them, as soon as he got back to the vicarage. ‘Well... I hope she’s all right.’
‘Tough ole bat,’ Dexter said. ‘Hey—’
‘Sorry?’
‘Give the vicar one for me.’ Dexter sniggered.
‘’Night, Dexter.’ Lol walked back into the churchyard. The snow had slowed again, or maybe the loss of light just made it seem that way.
‘Hold on – wrong way, boy.’
‘I’ll go through the orchard, into the vicarage garden.’
‘Don’t wanner do that this time o’ night. Bloody dangerous, look, all this—’
‘Done it loads of times. And I can check the other door, side of the church, on the way. You never know, do you?’
And now he did. He moved as quickly as he could through the untrodden snow, listening for the sound of Dexter crunching after him, like before, but it didn’t come.
He adjusted the head of the torch to issue a wide beam, and the graves appeared out of the snow, like the stumps of a shorn forest, all the unsightly bits – the borders and the gravel beds, the pots of long-dead flowers – submerged.
The path, too, had vanished, and he had to guess his way through the wider gaps between graves and tombs overhung by the snow-bent branches of elderly apple trees.
He stopped when he heard the breathing.
Coming from somewhere in front of him, and it was very loud, theatrically loud and eerie – vampire breathing. Something alive among the graves.
Dexter. Dexter had done a circuit of the church and was waiting for him and letting him know. He’d lied to Dexter – been this way no more than once or twice, in high summer. He turned, and his foot stabbed into a squat gravestone, mostly buried. He pulled back in pain, shining the torch directly ahead of him, the beam hitting a wall of white, an impassable snowbank. Swinging the torch to the right he found one of the old toppled tombs, its cracks and cavities compacted with snow.
And what looked like a collapsed, eroded stone angel, breathing.
Antony Largo was in his denims and he looked invigorated and younger than Jane remembered him, and more cheerful. Pacing the kitchen, sizing things up. The stubble on his face was almost a beard now, and made his grin seem bigger and whiter.
‘And how were you received, Matt?’
Matthew Hawksley considered. ‘She was polite, courteous... but I’m not holding my breath.’
‘She won’t go near it,’ Jane said. ‘Even a minor exorcism takes a lot of preparation – days, sometimes. They don’t go into it without long discussions with like everybody. In this case, she’d need the green light from the Bishop.’
‘Ah well,’ Antony said philosophically. ‘If it’s meant to be, it’ll happen.’
But Jane knew that he wouldn’t give up after all the trouble he’d taken to get here. After talking to her on the phone, he’d called up a guy who ran a film-unit resources business – called him up at home in the middle of the night and pestered him for something heavy and all-terrain within the hour. Whatever kind of money Antony had been waving around had brought him this monster Shogun, and then he’d done the journey the hard way, blasting up from London, through Gloucester and down to Ross. White-hellraiser.
‘Extremely nasty in places, but I just plugged on. Miles tae go before I sleep.’ He’d grinned. ‘Sleep? When I fetched up here, it was like I was already there – very dreamlike. Damn cops wouldnae even let me in at first.’
‘They thought you were a journalist,’ Ben had said, glancing at Amber, who was back at the stove, making soup and resenting all these people in her kitchen. ‘I think we’ll have to play all this by ear.’
Seeing Natalie brought in for questioning had unnerved Ben. Jane and Amber had agreed not to discuss what they’d learned from Beth Pollen, if only because Antony was back. OK, Women of the Midnight was TV history now, but if he found out Natalie’s real identity, nothing would stand in his way, like nothing.
The contemporary dynamic. The now drama.
‘I don’t know about the rest of you,’ Ben said, ‘but I’m just hoping this is some awful, awful mistake.’
‘Well,’ Antony said, ‘whoever the hell this Sebastian Dacre was, he’s given us a buzz we cannot ignore.’
‘Antony, everybody’s knackered, everybody’s fractious, everybody’s upset...’
‘Wrong,’ Antony said. ‘Everybody’s electrified.’
In semi-darkness, the dining room was like a derelict chapel – a dead fireplace at one end, at the other this lofty stained-glass window fogged with night and snow.
‘If you’re getting feelings of déjà vu,’ Bliss said, ‘it doesn’t hold any nice memories for me, either. As you know.’
He meant the time in October – although to Merrily, it still felt as raw as last week – when he’d asked her to talk to a particular man facing a murder charge, and she’d been dreading it and relieved when it hadn’t come off. And then the situation had turned into a free-rolling tragedy, and the guilt and remorse had kicked in.
Which was why there was no way she could say no to this one, or even think no.
The door to the hall was open, and they were standing in a narrow alley of diffused light. Bliss had been waiting when she and Gomer came back into the hotel.
‘We’ll be outside at both ends, Merrily.’
‘Tell me again. Give me all the details.’
‘There are no details. We never got that far.’
‘Then give me the outline again.’
‘She admits killing Dacre – that’s it. She keeps saying, “I killed him, what else do you want?” I say, “I want to know why.” She says, “You wouldn’t understand.” And then, after a bit, she goes, “If you do a couple of things for me, I’ll think of a full explanation for what happened, I’ll write it all down, and I won’t go back on it. I won’t ask for a lawyer and I’ll plead guilty.” And I’m saying, “But, Brigid, it won’t be the truth, will it?”
‘And she’s saying, “Whenever did the truth matter to a copper?”
‘Words to that effect. People don’t have much of an opinion of the police any more, do they? Not even convicted murderers. After I tell her I don’t think she’s actually in the best position to start demanding deals, we sit there in complete silence. Like, normally, I can sit quietly for as long as you like if I’ve got an excuse to keep staring at a lovely woman. But this one was somehow in control. Probably a status thing: the nationally famous killer and the obscure provincial detective. After about two minutes, I’m going, “All right, what is it? What are you after?” ’
Mumford’s shape in the doorway reduced the light to a corona around him.
‘Sorry to disturb you, boss, it’s as we feared: no chance of getting her into headquarters in the next four, five hours. Until daylight, in fact. Apparently, seventeen roads’ve been closed. Mostly this end of the county.’
‘Shucks.’
‘We can’t even get the body away.’
‘Where is he?’
‘In the van on the car park.’
‘You better tell all that to Howe, then.’ Bliss didn’t sound too unhappy. He turned to Merrily. ‘The Ice Maiden’s finally discovered who Natalie is. And consequently has decided the interrogation requires a woman’s touch. Looks like you’ll have to do. She’d hate that, wouldn’t she?’
‘Frannie...’
‘Remind me to compliment the esteemed leader of Hereford Council on putting all our money into new shopping c
entres instead of winter maintenance. We have the lady to ourselves. Let’s dance the night away.’
‘What did she say when you asked her what she was after?’
‘She said, “I’d like to see my daughter, alone, as soon as you can arrange it, and I’d also like, at some point, to talk to a Church of England minister called the Reverend Merrily Watkins.” Naturally, I ask her why and naturally she declines to tell me. And when I write down this vicar’s name I ask her to spell it because, naturally, we’re unacquainted.’
‘Why do I still get the feeling you engineered this?’
‘It’s what she said, Merrily, I swear to God.’
‘She didn’t mention Jane?’
‘No, thankfully she didn’t mention Jane.’
‘It sounds as if she doesn’t know I’m here.’
‘Then let’s surprise her,’ Bliss said. ‘For some reason that escapes me, despite all my training, experience and natural flair some people seem to prefer to unburden themselves to you. I’m not proud. It could save time.’
‘And if she tells me things in strict confidence?’
‘Then you can tell her what a basically nice, understanding person I am and how much better she’d feel sharing it all with me – as distinct from the cold-hearted friggin’ bitch awaiting her over in Hereford, should she decide to hold out.’
Merrily looked at the connecting door to the lounge. ‘Can I make a call before I go in? I need to... make sure things are OK at home.’
‘We have all the time in the world,’ Bliss said.
The sound of the breathing was like a recording, amplified, as though the tomb was an echo chamber, and something had reanimated the ancient corpse in there.
Most of her upper body was fused to the broken side of the tomb. Her legs were buried, and a weight of snow had collected in her lap like ice cream heaped in a bowl.
Only an inscripted slab of stone, long ago dislodged, had protected her face from the snow, and in the torchlight it was as florid as Lol remembered. Her tongue was out, and there was a spittle ring around her mouth, a dab of froth in one corner of her lips, bubbling when the breath came through.
Alive, though.
Tough ole bat.
Lol knelt down in the snow, brushing and pulling it away with both hands, uncovering a pink, quilted coat done up on the wrong buttons.
Whispering, ‘Alice...?’
All she did by way of reply was to go on breathing through her mouth, the air siphoned out in the gap alongside her protruding tongue.
Even her breath seemed cold.
She’d had a stroke. He’d seen this before – in one of the day rooms at the psychiatric hospital, a woman with schizophrenia having a stroke in an armchair in front of the TV, and her breathing filling the room. He remembered another patient going to turn up the telly.
He peered into her face: lopsided, like half of it had collapsed, her eyes closed. The colours of Alice’s face, when you thought about it, had always suggested high blood pressure.
Her’s likely wandered off. What they do, her age, minds start goin’.
Lol began furiously to shovel the snow out of Alice’s lap with cupped hands, then began digging out her lower legs, cold as marble.
The woman in the armchair, the white-coats had been very careful how they moved her. That was in a centrally heated day room.
How long had Alice been here? An hour?
She should be dead.
He bent and put an arm under her shoulders, prising them from the tomb. He unzipped his parka, pulled it off and put it around her shoulders, digging with his other hand to find the crook of her knees, until she came up in his arms, shedding her shroud of snow.
Knowing, all the time, that Dexter Harris had to be watching him from somewhere close.
44
Sanctuary
THE EASY CHAIR and the sofa had been placed at right angles under the brass-stemmed Victorian standard lamp, an intimate enclosure at the fireplace end of the long lounge. There was a coffee table with two coffees on it, served by the thickset policewoman whom Bliss had called Alma.
‘I thought I could wait just inside the door,’ Alma said to Merrily. ‘It’s a big room – I’m not going to hear anything you don’t want me to. I can sit there and read the paper.’
Merrily took off her coat and folded it over an arm of the sofa. ‘Wouldn’t it be possible for you to leave us completely alone?’
‘I still might have to keep looking in on you. Got my instructions.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Brigid Parsons said from the armchair, ‘what am I gonna do, hold her hostage? Strangle her with her dog collar?’
‘Not wearing one,’ Merrily said. ‘You’d have to garrotte me with the chain of my cross.’
Alma didn’t smile. Someone had thrown a fresh green log on the fire, making smoke and hiss and spiteful yellow flames.
‘Blimey.’ Brigid Parsons stretched out her long legs to the fireplace. ‘You really are Jane’s mother, aren’t you?’
‘If you want anything,’ Alma said, ‘don’t come out. Call me and I’ll come in.’ She glanced over her shoulder before she went out of the lounge door. The fire cracked and let go a fusillade of sparks. Brigid Parsons stood up quickly and stamped on a firefly speck on the carpet.
‘Ben Foley. Tight-arsed in all the wrong directions. I mean, come on – what’s a bag of coal cost?’ She sat down again. She wore tight jeans and a long-sleeved black shirt, with two or three buttons open, displaying a silver pendant in the form of what looked like an owl. A grey cardigan hung around her shoulders. She pushed back a strand of dark brown hair from over an eye. ‘Jane finally got you in?’
‘Indirectly. Which is the way it is with Jane. She doesn’t actively work against you, she’s just... indirect.’
‘She’s a good kid. I like Jane. She’s got a lively mind. Unlike poor little Clancy, but whose fault is that?’
Merrily sat down at the end of the sofa, near her coat. ‘Does she know? Clancy?’
‘About me? Yeah. Yeah, she does. I wasn’t going to tell her yet, I was gonna wait till she left school. I mean, I’d always found it surprisingly easy, not telling her – you walk out of prison into single-parent accommodation and a new identity, and that was kind of hard to get used to, so I used to practise on her. Telling her all about the new me before she was even old enough to understand what on earth I was on about. By the time she was two, the old me was history. Sorted.’
‘Why were you going to wait till she left school?’
‘Oh... because... Well, for a start, because Clancy isn’t like Jane, who’d see it as a big challenge. But also, if I waited till she was eighteen she’d have the option to walk away.’
‘From you?’
‘If she wanted to.’
‘Why did you tell her?’ Merrily drank some coffee. It was good. Amber Foley, Stanner Hall’s only asset. ‘Did somebody get on to you – the press?’
‘Nah, nothing like that. I mean, there was some of that, quite a few years ago – media trouble – when Clancy was little, and I had to change the name again – to Craven; when we ended up in Craven Arms, it was like a bad joke. It was a problem, for me, getting used to another surname. Less so for her. I think she thought it was something everybody had to do every few years. Excuse me, but are those cigs sticking out of your coat pocket?’
‘Want one?’ Merrily pulled out her Silk Cut and the Zippo.
‘Thanks. It’s a big thing when you first get out, not having to let one of the screws feel you up just to get yourself a fresh packet.’ She took a cigarette and Merrily lit it for her. ‘I’m sorry, I’m being flip. I don’t feel flip. I feel like shit, naturally.’
‘I can imagine.’
Brigid inhaled a lot of smoke and let it out slowly. ‘Reason I told Clancy about Brigid, and the reason, basically, that we came here, was that a kid at school – a boy – was taking the piss out of Clan because she was quite a bit behind the others. We’d moved aroun
d a lot, with my jobs, and we’d just come up from Cornwall, and she’d got behind, and this kid was like, “Oh you’re backward, you’re ESN.” Taunting her. I think he fancied her, actually – you know the oblique way they approach things at that age. How was he to know what a raw spot this was? So, anyway, she stuck a Biro in his eye.’
‘Oh.’
‘I mean, like really stuck it in. This wasn’t one of your classroom semi-accidents. Some of the kids from school would go down the chip shop at lunchtime, and she walked up to him in the street while he was eating his chips and she just stuck the flaming pen in his eye. I mean hard. Hard enough that he needed surgery to save his sight in that eye. The police were involved for a while, but there was no charge. But word gets out, obviously, and I had a call from my old minder, Ellie, who was actually the detective who’d arrested me. And Ellie’s like, what you gonna do about this? And she didn’t know the half of it. She didn’t know about Hattie. But she saw a dangerous parallel. I’m assuming you know what I mean.’
‘I think so.’ He lost an eye, Stuart, did you know?
‘So we sat down one night last spring, Clan and me, and I told her. We sat there just like this, drinking coffee – only it was a bloody sight warmer, of course. It was after dawn before we went to bed – together, like sisters. And she never went back to that school, and that was when we came down here to live with Jeremy.’
Brigid Parsons sat up and looked around vaguely, then leaned forward and tipped half an inch of ash into the grate. Merrily realized that she’d hardly stopped talking since the policewoman had left them alone.
‘That was a bit of an ice-breaker, wasn’t it?’ Brigid said.
Merrily felt very odd. It had been like two old mates catching up: the so-called woman of God and the woman who, as a teenager, had lured a boy into some derelict industrial building and inflicted upon him... was it forty-seven stab wounds?
‘They haven’t actually arrested me,’ Brigid said. ‘Or do I mean charged? Someone like me, they don’t know how to play it. It’s like asking the Queen if she needs the toilet. The red-haired Scouser said, “We’ve brought you in to ask you some questions, that’s all.” I just said, “I did it.” He’s like, what? And you could tell he’d rather I’d said, “Piss off, copper, you got nothing on me” like he presumably gets from everybody else. He looks at me like he can’t wait to get my clothes off and into a plastic bag.’
