Midwinter of the Spirit mw-2

by Phil Rickman

  ‘My dear child, you have no idea of the things I’ve got away with… I really do believe I am… protected.’

  ‘You’re mad. I can’t believe—’ She panicked then, pushing against him, tossing her head from side to side, summoning a scream.

  He jammed an arm into her mouth. ‘No,’ he said coldly, his other hand flattening a breast. ‘Not that. Never that.’

  Over his shoulder, she could see the Cathedral wall and one of the high, diamond-paned windows – with lights behind. With police, and perhaps a doctor summoned to examine Thomas Dobbs’s body, or an electrician to find out what went wrong earlier? Vergers, canons, all within twenty feet – as the Bishop of Hereford placed his long, sensitive fingers round her throat.

  ‘You rejected me, Mrs Watkins. On a personal level, that was the most insulting thing of all.’

  ‘I want to pray,’ she said.

  He laughed.

  ‘Does that really mean nothing to you?’

  He took his hands from her throat.

  ‘I don’t believe in God,’ he said, ‘except as something created by man in what he liked to believe was his image. I don’t believe in Satan. I don’t believe in saints – or demons. I accept the psychological power of symbolism, of costume drama.’

  She said, ‘You really don’t see it, do you?’ She squirmed to a sitting position, her back to the fountain. ‘You don’t see what you are!’

  He recoiled slightly, puzzled.

  ‘You don’t realize… that a non-believer who manipulates—’ she struggled to her feet as she spoke, ‘… who manipulates the belief system to promote his own power and influence…’ she snatched the stone pot from the top of the fountain; it was heavier than she expected; she almost let it fall; ‘… is the most satanic… person of all.’

  She was sobbing.

  ‘Put it down,’ the Bishop said.

  She managed to raise the pot, with both hands, over her head. She backed on to the path.

  Mick relaxed, spread his hands. ‘You going to throw that at me?’

  He was about four feet away from her. If she threw it at him with all her strength, he would catch it easily. If she came close enough to try to hit him with it, he would simply take it away from her.

  His eyes caught the full moon. His eyes were at their wildest; she sensed enjoyment, a need to be at all times very close to the edge.

  He shrugged.

  ‘I was going to let you pray. I was going to let you kneel and pray. I accept the level of your faith. Very well, I’ll use that pot, if you like. You can kneel and pray and, while you’re talking to God, I can bring it down very hard, very cleanly, on the back of your head. Bargain?’

  Her arms were aching, but she kept the pot raised, like an offering to the moon.

  ‘It distresses me that you have to die,’ Mick Hunter said. ‘The way it’s turned out with you, that leaves me sad. I do want you to know that I’m capable of feeling real distress.’

  He walked towards her with his arms outstretched.

  ‘Merrily?’

  There was nothing more to say. She arched her back, feeling a momentary acute pain in her spine, and hurled the stone pot into the great gothic diamond-paned window.

  54

  Friends in Dark Places

  YOU COULD SEE him sliding it into her. It was quite dark, but the camera came in close, and there was the beam of a torch or lamp on their fuzzy, shadowed loins. Candles wavered out of focus, balls of light in the background. You could make out the glimmer of a gothic window. Beneath the woman’s buttocks was what might have been an altar-cloth.

  ‘Is that him?’ Annie Howe asked. ‘Is it as simple as this?’

  They knew from his parents that, for a period during his time at Oxford, he’d had long hair – though it was not fashionable at the time – and also a beard. But there seemed to be no actual pictures of him from those days.

  ‘It could be him,’ Merrily said. ‘Then, again…’

  ‘You going to invite his wife to look at this?’ Huw wondered.

  ‘If necessary,’ Howe said. ‘I’m advised it may not be entirely politic at this stage to expose a bishop’s wife to pornography, and ask her if she recognizes her husband. She’s coming back this afternoon from her parents’ house in Gloucestershire. I’ve already spoken to her on the phone, and she didn’t seem as shocked as she might be. Any reason for that?’

  ‘It’s a marriage,’ Merrily said, ‘and maybe a political marriage, at that. Put it this way, their kids go to boarding school, and Val seems to spend a lot of time away from home.’

  ‘Interesting,’ Howe said.

  Her office at headquarters was no surprise. Minimalist was the word; the TV and video looked like serious clutter. Merrily found this calming for once; there were no layers here. She wondered if she dared light a cigarette. Perhaps not. Beyond the big window, the sky was grey and calm: one of those un-Christmassy mild days which so often precede Christmas.

  ‘All right.’ Howe stopped Paul Sayer’s tape and rewound it. ‘Let’s look at it one more time.’

  ‘Actually,’ Lol said, ‘that woman… Could I look at the woman?’

  Howe glanced at him with tilted head, and set the tape rolling again.

  The woman on the possible-altar wore a blindfold and a gag, but the more times you watched the scene, the less it seemed like rape. Too smooth. She was ready, Merrily thought.

  ‘It’s Anna Purefoy.’ Lol leaned forward from the plastic chair next to Merrily’s.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Howe asked him. ‘This woman looks quite young. I’m told the film could be twenty years old. I thought we might be looking at the very early days of home-video, but my sergeant suggests it was transferred from something called Super Eight cine-film. Even so, Anna would have been in her late thirties, early forties.’

  ‘It’s her,’ Lol insisted.

  ‘Aye, they like to take care of themselves.’ Huw Owen was occupying a corner of Howe’s desk. He was the untidiest object in the immaculate room.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Owen?’

  ‘Secret of eternal youth, lass – sometimes you’d think they’d found it. Then they’ll go suddenly to seed, or become gross like Crowley. Drugs were no help, mind, in his case.’

  Howe stood with her back to the window. She appeared, for some reason, uncharmed at being addressed as ‘lass’.

  ‘Well, it’s clear that this tape is never going to be usable in evidence, even if we could put our hands on the original. But it does prompt speculation. Would you like to speculate for us, Mr Owen?’

  ‘I get the feeling you were at university,’ Huw said. ‘Did they have any kind of occult society at your place?’

  ‘There were a hundred different societies, but I was never a joiner.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ Huw said. ‘Well, you look at most universities, you’ll find some kind of experimental mystical group – harmless enough in most cases, but one association leads to another.’

  Merrily said, ‘I have a problem with that. I can’t see Mick having any interest at all in mysticism.’

  ‘Happen a reaction against his solid clergy family?’

  ‘His reaction, then, would be to avoid any kind of religious experience.’

  ‘My knowledge of theology is limited,’ Howe said, ‘but what we’ve just been watching is not what I would immediately think of as religious.’

  ‘No,’ Merrily said, ‘it’s plain sex. If you’re looking for serious motivating forces in Mick’s life, you’d have to put sex close to the top. He’d be nineteen or twenty then, newly liberated from the bosom of what was probably a less-than-liberal family. Suppose he thought he was getting involved with people who could, I don’t know, extend his experience in all kinds of interesting ways.’

  ‘Very astute, lass.’ Huw patted her shoulder. ‘As you’ve been finding out, clergy and the children of clergy are always fair game.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So we’ve got a lad from a high-placed clergy
family, up at Oxford. What was he reading?’

  ‘History,’ Howe said, ‘and politics.’

  ‘He could have become anything,’ Merrily said, ‘yet winds up following his father into the Church. You just can’t see him as a curate, somehow.’ She looked up at Howe. ‘It’s like imagining Annie here directing traffic.’

  Howe scowled.

  ‘That’s interesting,’ Huw said. ‘Why did he do it? You really want me to develop a theory, Inspector?’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘All right. You’ve got this smart, handsome lad from a dogcollar dynasty, putting it around Oxford like a sailor on shoreleave. And he’s drawn into summat – drawn in, to put it crudely, by his dick. He’s having the time of his life – the best time ever. He doesn’t see the little rat eyes in the dark.’

  ‘Meaning what, Mr Owen?’

  ‘There is a network. It might not put out a monthly newsletter, but it does exist. The general aim is anti-Christian. They might be several different groups, but that’s their one rallying point – the destruction of the Christian Church.’

  ‘I’d have thought,’ Howe said drily, ‘that they could simply sit back and watch the Church take itself apart.’

  ‘She’s got a point,’ Merrily said, the need for a cigarette starting to tell.

  ‘Merrily, lass, you’d be very naive if you thought the Church’s problems were entirely self-generated.’

  ‘Sorry, go on.’

  “They’ve got a good intelligence network, the rat-eyes. The Internet now, more primitive then but, just like Moscow was head-hunting at Oxford and Cambridge in the sixties, the rateyes had their antennae out.’

  Lol said, ‘Anna Purefoy was in Oxfordshire then. She worked for the county council. She’d been fired from the MOD after some fundamentalist junior minister found out she was involved in magic, along with a few other people – a purge.’

  ‘Part of the honey-trap then,’ Huw said. ‘Beautiful, experienced older woman. Aye, I think we can rule out rape in them pictures. Happen she said she enjoyed being tied up. If that is Hunter, it’s an interesting connection, but I’d be looking for something harder. Suppose they stitched our lad up good? Suppose they had him full of drugs, and suppose he really did rape somebody – a young girl, say. Suppose they even arranged for him to kill somebody.’

  Annie Howe began to look uneasy. ‘That stuff’s surely apocryphal.’

  ‘That stuff happens all the time,’ Huw told her. ‘You coppers hate to think there’s ever a murder you don’t know about, but there’s thousands of folk still missing. All right, say they’ve stitched him up – tight enough to have him looking at public disgrace and a long prison sentence.’

  Howe sighed. ‘Go on, then.’

  ‘What do they want of him? I think they want him in the Church.’

  ‘Oh, wow,’ Merrily murmured.

  ‘Make your father a happy man, they’d say. Repent of your evil ways. Make restitution. Join the family business. Either that or go down, all the way to the gutter. Well, he’s in a panic, is our lad: self-disgust and a hangover on a grand scale. In need of redemption. So he goes home to his loving family, and the result, after the nightmares and the cold sweats, is the Reverend Michael Henry Hunter, a reformed character.’

  ‘It’s a brilliant theory, Huw. Is there a precedent?’

  ‘Happen.’

  ‘Meaning one you never proved.’

  Huw looked down at his trainers. ‘I once exorcised a young curate from Halifax who admitted celebrating a black mass. It was to get them off his back, he said. Blackmail again. I never met anybody more full of remorse.’

  ‘You think Mick—?’

  ‘It’s sometimes what they do. They get in touch after he’s ordained, with “Do us this one thing and we’ll leave you alone for ever.” Ha! You likely don’t know this, Inspector, but having a reverse-eucharist performed by an ordained cleric is a very powerfully dark thing. And a fully turned cleric is… lord of all.’

  ‘Like Tim Purefoy,’ Lol said.

  ‘There’s one as is better dead, God forgive me.’

  ‘Hold on,’ Howe said. ‘Are you saying these – whoever they are… possibly the Purefoys – might have been in touch with Hunter throughout his whole career?’

  ‘Very likely smoothing his path for him. A satanic bishop? Some prize, eh?’

  ‘Except he wasn’t really,’ Merrily said. ‘He was a man with no committed religious beliefs at all. Perhaps that’s how he could live with it. “I don’t believe in the Devil” – he said that to me. Perhaps he really believed he was using them.’

  ‘Very likely, lass.’ Huw opened out his hands. ‘Very likely. But it doesn’t change a thing.’

  ‘But what a career, Huw! What an incredibly lucky career. He never put a foot wrong, said all the right things to all the right people, charmed everyone he met with his energy and his sincerity. He actually told me he believed he was protected.’

  ‘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 motorw
ay 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.’