by Phil Rickman
‘Obstacles would be moved out of his path. Look at how he got this job – his one rival has a convenient heart attack. Oh, aye, he could very well come to believe he was protected. But not by God, not by the Devil – by his own dynamism, his willpower, his bloody destiny. But what’s the truth of it, Merrily? The truth is he’s a demonic force, whether he believes in it or not.’
‘He believed he was invulnerable, obviously.’ Annie Howe switched off the TV and went to sit down behind her desk, behind a legal notepad. ‘Certainly, if he seemed to think he could murder Ms Watkins in the actual Cathedral precincts, and we’d simply arrest James Lyden for it…’
‘Do you think you would have, lass?’
‘I hate to think so, but… well, we might have. As Lyden had already, that same evening, attacked Jane Watkins and left her unconscious in the crypt with her coat on fire. We’re trying to persuade the CPS to go for attempted murder on that, by the way, but I don’t suppose they will. Tell me your feelings on Sayer, Mr Owen.’
‘Headbanger.’
‘Meaning an amateur, a hanger-on.’
‘If he possessed this tape, he might have been more than that – or not. Did he have a computer? Was he on the Internet?’
‘He was, come to think of it.’
‘You can dredge all kinds of dirt off the Net. If we assume he did know it was Mick Hunter on that tape, he might’ve tried a bit of blackmail. And Hunter sees the tape… or happen he’s seen it before. He knows it looks bugger-all like him now, so he’s not worried about the tape, but he doesn’t like the idea of this lad Sayer walking round spreading bad rumours. Aye, he might well’ve bopped him over the head and dragged him down to the Wye. Cool as you like, popped him in a boat – I bet he had a boat, didn’t he, athletic bugger like him wi’ a river at the bottom of the garden. Then rowed him downstream. Who in a million years would ever look towards the Bishop’s Palace…?’
‘I don’t think Hunter was even supposed to be here that night,’ Merrily said. ‘Out of town, as I recall.’
Huw snorted.
There was a long silence. Merrily looked at Lol, remembering she hadn’t been all that convinced when he’d first told her about Katherine Moon. And yet Lol himself had actually underestimated the full extent of it. They both needed a long walk – somewhere you could feel you weren’t looking through a dirty spiderweb.
‘There isn’t a shred of evidence for any of this, Mr Owen, is there?’ said Annie Howe.
‘We’re none of us coppers, lass. Just poor clergy and a lad wi’ a guitar.’
‘As for the other stuff: the ley-lines, the sacrifice of crows, the alleged presence in the Cathedral…’ Howe pushed her notepad away. ‘I don’t want to know about any of it. I don’t know how you people can pretend to… to do your job at all. To me, it’s a complete fantasy world.’
Lol said, ‘Have you talked to James Lyden?’
‘I have tried to talk to James Lyden. He blames the girl – Rowenna Napier. We found her car, by the way – at the car park at the Severn Bridge motorway services. We’ve circulated a description. Her family seems to have given up on her. Lyden still thinks she’s called Melissa, and that she lived with her now late foster-parents, with whom he’d spent many an interesting hour at their farmhouse on Dinedor Hill.’
‘She seems to have used a number of identities,’ Merrily said.
‘But, in the end, just one,’ said Huw.
Howe looked at him.
‘The archetypal Scarlet Woman, lass. The temptress.’
Merrily thought, What’s he saying? It was true that everything about Rowenna disturbed her: preying like a succubus on the Salisbury clergy, obviously dominating her own family – why had Mrs Straker suddenly clammed up? – and pulling off that insidiously effective psychic attack with the dregs of Denzil Joy. Rowenna was terribly dangerous – and still out there.
‘She certainly seems to have acquired a considerable amount of money,’ Howe said.
‘For services rendered,’ Huw told her.
‘Certainly the basis for a few questions when we do find her. And I do want to find that girl – and Michael Hunter – before someone at Division decides to take this case out of my hands. Which is why I’m talking to… to people like you. Ms Watkins, when you suggested to Hunter that he knew something about the death of Paul Sayer…?’
‘I’m sorry. I chose that moment to try and get away. Paul Sayer was never mentioned again.’
‘But you raised it with him purely because your secretary told you she recognized Sayer from one of my photographs, yes?’
‘It was the day you came into the Deliverance office. She recognized Sayer as a man who had actually come into the office asking for the Bishop – making Mick angry in a way Sophie says she’d never seen before – in a way that seemed to her… unepiscopal. Sophie’s very discreet and very loyal, but also very observant.’
‘This was not on the night he died, however.’
‘No. A couple of days earlier.’
‘Hold on.’ Howe picked up a phone. ‘Douglas, could somebody bring in Mrs Sophie Hill from the Bishop’s office?… No, now… Thank you.’
‘What you have to understand about Sophie,’ said Merrily, ‘is that the Cathedral is her life. She worried about this thing for days. She kept half-approaching me and then backing off.’
‘Sure,’ Howe said. ‘Damn it, I think I’m going to have some divers in the Wye again.’
Huw slid from her desk. ‘For Hunter?’
‘What do you think?’
‘Unlikely. He moves fast, that lad, in his jogging gear.’
Merrily closed her eyes for a moment, trying to remember which way Hunter had gone after the stone pot had made such a gloriously jagged, noisy hole in ancient glass. He’d stared at her for a moment, then she’d turned and run away – as lights were coming on everywhere, a verger and a policeman thrusting out of the door.
‘And Hunter has friends,’ Huw said. ‘More friends than even he knows. Friends in dark places.’
55
Location Classified
THEY SAT AMONGST the stones and they lit a candle for Tommy Canty.
Huw held the candle over each disfigured knight in turn, making a blessing for each. Merrily wondered if it had been the Bishop himself who had taken away the single knight and then brought it back, making sure that the tomb was still lying in pieces for the time of the Boy Bishop ceremony.
They would probably never know. Huw was convinced Mick Hunter would now be abroad. Italy, he thought; there were a number of dark sanctuaries in Italy. How did he know that?
So many questions.
DS Franny Bliss had been summoned back to St Cosmas and St Damien after reports from the two ornithologist ladies that a couple of people had been seen acting suspiciously close to the church, which the ladies apparently had been virtually staking out ever since. As a result, Craig the crow-catcher was in the cells, now suspected of greater involvement in the desecration than previously thought.
So, once again last night, simultaneous action along the Dinedor Line – with the Cathedral in the middle. Jane had seen Rowenna making a call on her mobile phone – perhaps to the Purefoys – as the Boy Bishop was about to be installed. And then, coincidentally or not, a power failure. Its cause had still not been established.
Lol was convinced that, this time, the Purefoys – always assuming they were controlling the assault, which was by no means certain – believed they were using the very spirit, the element, the essence of Katherine Moon to try to awaken something aggressively pre-Christian. They believed it, so at some level it was happening? And what form had their ritual – over by the time Lol arrived – actually taken? This all needed thinking about. Perhaps Merrily would be compelled to consult (Oh God!) Miss Athena White.
‘But they were right, weren’t they, lass?’ Huw was stroking a stone.
‘Mm?’
‘The demon manifested in clerical clothing?’
‘Yes, I su
ppose it did.’
And where was it now? Where was the squatter? Did it die with Dobbs? Did it flee with Mick? Was it over?
‘Over?’ Huw laughed a lot. ‘The oldest war in the world, over? I’ll tell you what, though…’ He grew sober. ‘We’re up against it now. The Church is on its knees now, and the more we get weakened by public apathy, the more they’ll put the boot in.’
‘Jane thinks there’s a new spirituality on the rise, replacing organized worship.’
‘With all respect to the lass,’ Huw said, ‘it’s people like Jane who’ll turn religion into a minority sport.’
‘She sees it more in terms of a period of cataclysmic psychic upheaval.’
‘Could be,’ Huw said. ‘But if that happens, they’ll still need somebody to police it. And, all the time, we’re going to have folk like your Inspector Howe dismissing us as loonies. We’re going to have battles with psychologists and social workers. We’re going to be attacked by fellers like that Dick Lyden, who thinks Dobbs was persecuting his poor maladjusted son. And, naturally, we’re always going to be regarded with suspicion within the Church itself.’
Merrily stood up and dusted her knees. ‘Hunter wanted me to draft a paper on New Deliverance. He suggested this would be an approach acceptable to psychologists and social workers.’
‘For New Deliverance, read Soft Deliverance,’ Huw said.
‘I suppose that’s right.’
‘Happen that was going to be one of Mick’s principal contributions: pioneer of Soft Deliverance. On the surface, decently liberal – exorcism by committee – but, underneath, the gradual dismantling of the final human barrier against satanic evil.’
Merrily shook her head, dubious, bewildered.
‘Stick with it, lass,’ Huw said. ‘You’ve come too far now.’
‘I don’t know. The new bishop may not want me.’
‘There’s that,’ Huw said.
‘Anyway, there’s a lot to think about. Lol and I are going to drive up into the Malverns, or somewhere – to do some walking and talking. He’s very confused and spooked, after his showdown with the Purefoys. It’s all going round in his head; he’s realizing how close he came to winding up as dead as they are, and he’s thinking: What is this about?’
‘I gather that lad Denny Moon died this morning.’
‘Yes.’ She didn’t want to talk about what Lol had heard from a porter in the Accident and Emergency unit at the General.
‘Poor bugger. Always some casualties, Merrily, luv. Always.’
The porter said that, a few seconds after Denny was pronounced dead, a woman patient who’d been brought in after falling down some steps had begun to scream, and the nurses had had to open a window to let out a large black bird.
Huw was saying, ‘Incidentally, I don’t know who the Purefoys have left their place to, and I don’t like to think. But I reckon it could do with some attention smartish if we don’t want yet more hassle.’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t think I could.’
Huw said, ‘Oh, aye, I think you could.’
‘You were the one who tried to talk me out of this whole thing!’
‘That were because there was no tradition then,’ Huw said. ‘I think you’ve started one. Too late to back out now. You know what I’d do?’
‘What?’
‘Bugger the Malverns, they’ll not go away. Take the lad up to Dinedor and do a little service of restitution for the spirit of this Katherine Moon. And for her brother. And their parents. See what happens.’
‘I dread to think.’
‘Don’t dread,’ said Huw. ‘Second Law of Deliverance: never dread. Don’t do it in the barn; it might be dangerous in there – I mean falling masonry and that. Go to the tip of the owd ramparts, and look out down the line, through All Saints and this place, to St Cosmas and St Damien.’
‘Will you come?’
‘I will not. It’s not my patch.’
‘What about the major exorcism? Who do we consult?’
‘I think…’ Huw looked up at the enormous stained-glass window, suddenly aglow with unexpected winter sunshine. ‘I think we can leave it alone. Stand back, lass.’
He began to lug one of the stone panels of the Cantilupe tomb to one side, revealing a bundle of white and gold cloth about the size of a tobacco pouch. He bent down and gathered it up.
Merrily leaned over his shoulder. ‘What on earth have you got there, Huw?’
‘Picked it up before I fetched Dobbs from the hospital. Planted it here before the service – with all due ceremony, naturally – so it was there throughout.’
He unrolled the cloth. There was a fragment of what looked at first like brick: dark red-brown, and brittle.
‘Holy relics, lass.’ Huw said. ‘The undying power of holy relics.’
Dark red.
‘Oh, my God,’ Merrily said. ‘His bones were supposed to have bled, weren’t they?’
‘Bit of the skull, apparently. Borrowed it from some monks. Location classified.’
‘God.’ She put out a finger.
‘Aye, go on, lass. It’s all right. You wouldn’t have got within ten yards of the bugger when he were alive, mind, but there you go. Times change.’
He let her touch the piece of bone, and then rolled it up in its cloth again and slipped it into an inside pocket of his blue canvas jacket, next to his heart.
‘Come on, then, Tommy,’ he said.
Closing Credits
IT’s ALWAYS DIFFICULT setting a novel in real locations without appearing to implicate real people… which is why I’ve always avoided meeting the Bishop of Hereford.
However, the book would have been impossible without invaluable background information from a Hereford Deliverance minister, who prefers, like Merrily, to keep a low profile; from the Director of the Hereford Cathedral Perpetual Trust, Sue Embrey, who provided crucial information on the Cathedral and the tomb of Thomas Cantilupe and was always really helpful and encouraging; from Ron Shoesmith, the archaeologist overseeing renovation of the Canty tomb; from Richard Powell, of Capps and Capps, the mason who performed the actual renovation (without losing any bits) and from Brian Chave, who showed me Merrily’s office and Mick’s lair.
For information on Dinedor Hill and Cathedral-related hauntings, thanks to Hereford journalists Nicola Goodwin and George Children (whose excellent book, Prehistoric Sites of Herefordshire, co-written with George Nash, is published by Logaston Press).
Also thanks to Nick Whitehead, Andrew Hewson, Jill Dibbling, Penny Arnold and, of course, Pam Baker for the awful story of The Real Denzil Joy (oh, yes, there are some nurses who still have nightmares…). And Mark Owen thought it was time he got a mention, so here it is.
Finally, at the production end… thanks to my wife, Carol, who combined a massive, wide-ranging and detailed four-week professional (if unpaid) edit with some absolutely vital plot-surgery.
Lol Robinson’s songs can be found on two full-length CDs, Songs from Lucy’s Cottage and A Message from the Morning (which includes Moon’s Tune) by Lol Robinson and Hazey Jane II, produced by Prof Levin and Allan Watson.
The Midwinter locations are included in Merrily’s Border by Phil Rickman, with photographs by John Mason. (Logaston Press)
Full details on the website www.philrickman.co.uk
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Part One Imprint
1. It
2. Fluctuation
Part Two Virus
3. Storm trooper
4. Moon
5. The Last Exorcist
6. Sweat and Mothballs
7. Graveyard Angel
8. Beautiful Theory
9. Clerical Chic
10. Denzil
11. Scritch-scratch
12. Soiled
13. Show Barn
14. The First Exorcist
15. Male Thing
16. Real Stuff
&nb
sp; 17. Wise Women
18. Overhead Cables Cut
19. Costume Drama
20. Not Good
21. Chalk Circle
22. Edict
23. Strawberry Ice
24. Last Long Prayer
25. Sad Tosser
26. Family Heirloom
27. Protect Her This Night
28. Crone with a Toad
29. Fog
Part Three Projection
30. Self-pity
31. Old Tiger
32. Fantasy World
33. Wrong Number, Dear
34. A Party
35. Sholto
36. Crow Maiden
37. Faeces and Gangrene
38. Nevermore
39. One Sad Person
Part Four Squatter
40. Dark Hand
41. Take Me
42. The Invisible Church
43. Deep Penetration
44. A Candle for Tommy
45. All There Is
46. The Turning
47. Medieval Thing
48. Blood
49. Costume Drama
50. Abode of Darkness
51. Sacrilege
52. A Small Brilliance
53. Silly Woman
54. Friends in Dark Places
55. Location Classified
Closing Credits
