by Phil Rickman
‘But you must have known they were going to publish it?’
‘I suppose I had an idea, yes.’
‘Had a—?’ The mind boggled. She tried another direction. ‘Erm… the feeling I get is that this Mr Stock is trying to… get back… at the landowner. Mr Lake.’
‘And also his wife’s uncle, I’d guess,’ St John said.
‘The one who’s dead?’
‘It’s rather complicated.’ He didn’t seem unfriendly, but neither did he seem inclined to explain anything.
Last try: ‘You’ve also been accused of being part of a rural mafia,’ Merrily said.
Simon St John laughed. There was laid-back, Merrily thought, and there was indifferent. ‘I’ve been accused of far worse things than that,’ he said eventually. ‘But thanks for letting me know.’
‘That’s… OK.’
‘I expect we’ll get to meet sooner or later.’
‘Yes.’
‘Goodbye, then,’ he said.
It was another of those days: Mercury still retrograde, evidently.
She tried the Shelbones again and let the phone ring for at least a couple of minutes before hanging up and calling back and getting, as she’d half expected, the engaged tone. The implication of this was that someone was dialling 1471 to see who’d called. So maybe they would phone her back.
But they didn’t, and Hazel Shelbone’s excuse that she didn’t want to talk to Merrily while Amy was in the house was wearing thin. Most people now had a mobile, especially senior council officials. Behind that old-fashioned, God-fearing Christianity, deep at the bottom of the reservoir of maternal love, there was something suspicious about this family.
So how was she supposed to proceed? The request for a spiritual cleansing was still on the table. Merrily didn’t think she could just turn away, like Simon St John. Besides, she was curious.
She was finishing her evening meal of Malvern ewe’s cheese and salad when Fred Potter, the freelance journalist, rang again.
‘Before you say anything,’ Merrily said, ‘who alerted you to this story? I mean originally.’
‘Ah, well.’ He laughed nervously. ‘You know how it goes, with news sources.’
‘Yeah, down a one-way street. If someone like me doesn’t disclose something, we’re accused of covering up the truth, while you’re protecting your sources.’ She paused. ‘How about off the record?’
‘Oh, Mrs Watkins…’
‘You know,’ Merrily said thoughtfully, ‘something tells me this won’t necessarily be the last time our paths cross. I do tend to get mixed up in all kinds of things that could make good stories. Who knows when you might—’
‘You’re a very devious woman.’
‘I’m a minister of God,’ she said primly.
The scullery’s white walls were aflame with sunset. She lit a cigarette.
‘All right,’ Fred Potter said. ‘Off the record, it was brought in by our boss, Malcolm Millar. He knows Stock from way back. Stock was in PR.’
‘When was all this? When did you learn about it?’
‘Couple of days ago. Malcolm sent me out to see the Stocks yesterday morning.’
‘So it’s likely they cooked it up between them?’
‘Oh no. I don’t think so. I mean, a ghost story – that’s not something you can verify, is it? I can tell you it’s dead right about how dark it is in there. I couldn’t live in that place. It’s a scandal that this guy, Lake, can just block off someone’s daylight to that extent.’
‘There are laws on ancient lights. It’s one for Stock’s solicitor.’
‘But the press don’t charge a hundred pounds an hour, do we?’
‘What I’m getting at, that’s not our problem, is it? I mean the Church’s. We just come in on the haunting. And if that turns out to be made up—’
‘Please, Mrs Watkins.’
‘I’m not making notes, Fred. I’m just… covering myself.’
‘It’s like asking if I believe in ghosts,’ he said. ‘Maybe I don’t, but a lot of people do, don’t they? Presumably you must.’
‘Sometimes.’
‘OK…’ A pause, as if he was looking round to make sure he was alone. ‘He’s a bit of an operator.’
‘Stock?’
‘He’s been in PR a long time. A lot of PR involves making up stories that sound plausible. If he did want to make up a story, he’d know how to go about it and he obviously knew where to take it. It’s only people close to the media who know that if you want to make a big impact very quickly, you don’t go to a paper and offer them an exclusive, you go to an agency like ours because we can send it all round… national papers, TV, radio…’
‘And the more outlets you send it to, the more money you collect.’
‘Sure, news is a business. But it’s in our interest, at the end of the day, to make sure the story’s sound – or at least, you know, stands up – or else various outlets are gonna stop coming back to us. If you get a reputation for being a bent agency, it’s not good, long-term.’
‘But, bottom line, this probably is a scam.’
Fred hesitated. ‘I don’t know. He’s a bombastic kind of bloke – comes over like big mates soon as he meets you – but underneath… I reckon there was something worrying him. He was really shaky. I mean, when people are quivering and telling you how terrified they are, it could be an act. But when somebody’s got this veneer of cockiness, and something else – call it fear – shows through, that’s harder to fake, isn’t it? Or it could mean he’s got a drink problem or something, I really wouldn’t like to say. You’re not gonna drop me in it, are you? I mean, I’d love to work for the Independent or something, but you’ve got to take what you can get.’
‘Life’s such a bitch, Fred. What did you ring for, anyway?’
‘A follow-up, I suppose, a new line on the story. I mean, you said you were going to look into it…’
‘I didn’t really, though, did I? What I said—’
‘Give me a break, Merrily. I think you’ll find a few papers’ll pick up on this again tomorrow.’
‘Meaning you’ll try and persuade them to.’
‘It’s…’ Fred Potter whistled thinly. ‘It’s a business, like I said.’
‘All right – off the record?’
He sighed. ‘Yeah, OK.’
‘I’m in a difficult position,’ Merrily said. ‘It’s hard for me to move on anything unless the local minister requests assistance. In this case, it strikes me that the local guy, St John, knows exactly what Mr Stock’s up to. So I don’t think we’re going to want to get involved.’
‘But if you do take it any further…’
‘I’ll let you know, promise.’
‘That’s what they all say.’
‘Yeah, but I’m a minister of the Church, Fred.’
‘Hmm,’ Fred Potter said.
Merrily washed up her solitary dinner plate, went back into the scullery and called the Shelbones yet again.
The phone rang and rang, and she just knew the bungalow wasn’t empty. She imagined all three Shelbones standing in the narrow hall, silently watching the base unit quivering. These Shelbones were wearing starched Puritan dress, like the Pilgrim Fathers, and the phone was a dangerous conduit to a bad, modern world that they believed could only do them harm.
She put back the receiver, picked up her cigarettes and lighter and took them into the kitchen, where she put the kettle on. She stood at the west window, waiting for the water to boil, looking out on the twilit garden and the scrum of shadows in the apple orchard where, in 1670, the Rev. Wil Williams, of this parish, was said to have hanged himself to escape a charge of witchcraft. It was claimed Wil had frolicked here with sylphs and fauns. Except it probably hadn’t been so simple.
Merrily recalled Amy Shelbone’s thin body surrendering to that eerie shiver.
Who’s Justine, Amy?
She slid a cigarette between her lips and flicked at the lighter. Nothing happened. Several more fl
icks raised nothing more than sparks. Merrily took her shoulder bag to the kitchen table and felt inside for matches. Something rolled heavily across the table and fell to the floor.
The room was sinking into the dregs of the day. She put on lights and finally found a book of matches with the logo of the Black Swan Hotel. Its timber-pillared porch stood across the cobbled village square from the vicarage under a welcoming lantern, and she briefly thought how pleasant it would be to wander across there in the dusk and sit in the new beer garden at the back with a glass of white wine.
She sat down at the kitchen table, lit her cigarette and saw, through the smoke, an image of Jane at the front gate yesterday morning. Merrily bit her lip, leaned back out of the smoke, and finally bent and picked up the misshapen penny dated 1797. It must have rolled from her bag, though she didn’t remember putting it in there.
It just kept turning up. Like a bad penny.
If you don’t like the cold, come out of the mortuary, Huw Owen had said mercilessly.
Merrily sat for a while, with Ethel the black cat winding around her ankles, and smoked another cigarette before she left the vicarage.
It was that luminous period, well beyond sunset, when the northern sky had kindled its own cool light show above the timbered eaves of Ledwardine and the wooded hills beyond. The village lights were subdued between mullions, behind diamond panes.
Wearing her light cotton alb, ankle-length, tied loosely at the waist with white cord, Merrily crossed the cobbles and slipped quietly through the lychgate.
The church looked monolithic, rising out of a black tangle of gravestones and apple trees into a sky streaked with salmon and green. In a summer concession to trickle-tourism, the oak door was still unlocked, but she assumed she’d be alone in here; since evensong had been discontinued, Sunday night was the quietest time.
She didn’t put on the church lights, finding her way up the central aisle by the muddy lustre left by dulled stained glass on shiny pew-ends and sandstone pillars. It was cool in the nave, but not cold.
In the chancel, behind the screen of oaken apples, she took out her book of matches and lit two candles on the altar, creating woolly, white-gold globes which brought the sandstone softly to life.
She placed the old penny on the altar, blessing it again.
‘As I use it in faith, forgive my sins…’
It was, she realized now, not a game of chance but a simple act of faith. Of trust. Most priests, in times of crisis, would open the Bible at random, trusting that meaningful lines would leap out, telling them which way to jump.
How different was that to one of Jane’s New Age gurus cutting the Tarot pack?
The difference was Christian faith. There was a huge difference. Wasn’t there?
The candles had hollowed out for her a sanctum of light, with the nave falling away into greyness, along with the organ pipes and the Bull Chapel with its seventeenth-century tomb. The atmosphere was calm and absorbent, the church’s recharging time just beginning. As Jane would point out smugly, this was a site of worship long-predating Christianity. You’re employing some ancient energy there, Mum.
Pre-dating Jesus Christ perhaps, she’d reply swiftly – but not pre-dating God.
Gods. Jane grinning like an elf. And goddesses.
Merrily let the kid’s image fade, like the Cheshire cat, into the flickering air, with its compatible scents of polish and hot beeswax. She knelt before the altar, her covered knees at the edge of the carpet, just within the globes of light.
OK.
She closed her eyes and whispered the Lord’s Prayer and then knelt in silence for several minutes, feeling the soft light around her like an aura. She remembered, as always, those deep and silent moments in the little Celtic chapel where her spiritual journey had begun: the moments of the blue and the gold and the lamplit path.
Her breathing slowed. She felt warm with anticipation and dismissed the sensation immediately.
Then she summoned Amy Shelbone.
More minutes passed before she was able to visualize the child: Amy wearing her school uniform, clean and crisp, tie straight, hair brushed, complexion almost translucently white and clear. Amy kneeling at the altar, as she’d been on the Sunday she was sick.
I don’t know anything about her, Merrily confessed to God. I don’t know what her problem is. I don’t know if she’s in need of spiritual help or psychological help or just love. I don’t know. I want to help her, but I don’t want to interfere if that’s going to harm her.
Her lips unmoving. The words forming in her heart.
Her heart chakra, Jane would insist: the body’s main emotional conduit.
Without irritation, she sent Jane away again and put Amy at the periphery of her consciousness, at the entrance to her candlelit sanctuary. She knelt for some more minutes, losing all sense of herself, opening her heart to…
She’d long ago given up trying to visualize God. There was no He or She. This was a Presence higher than gender, race or religion, transcending identity. All she would ever hope to do was follow the lamplit path into a place within and yet beyond her own heart and stay there and wait, patient and passive and without forced piety.
When – if – the time came, she would ask if Amy might join them in the sanctuary.
Amy and…
Justine?
Three questions hovered, three possibilities: Is the problem psychological, or demonic, or connected with the unquiet spirit of a dead person?
Merrily let the questions rise like vapour, and prayed calmly for an answer. More minutes passed; she was only dimly aware of where she was and yet there was a fluid feeling of focus and, at the same time, a separation… a sublime sense of the diminution of herself… the aching purity and beauty of submission to something ineffably higher.
At one stage – although, somehow, she didn’t remember any of this until it was over – she’d felt an intrusion, a discomfort. And for a long moment there was no candlelight and the chancel was as dark – darker – than the rest of the church and bitterly cold and heavy with hurt, incomprehension, bitterness and finally an all-encompassing sorrow.
She didn’t move, the moment was gone and so, it seemed, was Amy Shelbone. And Merrily’s cheeks were wet with tears, and she was aware of a fourth question:
What shall I do?
Please, what shall I do?
She tossed the heavy old coin and it fell with an emphatic thump to the carpet in the chancel. She had to bring one of the candlesticks from the altar to see which side up it was. But it didn’t matter, she knew anyway. This was only proof, only confirmation.
She held the candle close to the coin. The candle was so much shorter now, the candlestick bubbled with hot wax.
Tails.
Nothing demonic.
She tossed again.
Tails.
No possession by an unquiet spirit.
She nodded, held the coin tightly in her right hand, snuffed out the candles, bowed her head to the altar and walked down the aisle and out of the church.
***
In the porch, it was chilly. The goosebumps came up on her arms.
In the churchyard, it was raining finely out of a grey sky that was light though moonless. Clouds rose like steam above the orchard beyond the graves. It had been a warm, summer evening when she went in, and now—
Now a figure appeared from around the side of the porch, carrying an axe.
11
One Girl in Particular
THE DEW ON the tombstone was soaking through the cotton alb to her thighs. She had her arms wrapped around herself, one hand still clutching her coin, and she was shivering.
Disoriented, she looked up, following the steeple to the starless sky, puzzled because it was so bright up there, yet she couldn’t see a moon.
‘Oughter get home, vicar,’ Gomer Parry said. ‘Don’t bugger about n’more.’
He was leaning on his spade. It was an ordinary garden spade, not an axe, but could be near
ly as deadly, she imagined, in the hands of the wiry little warrior in the flat cap and the bomber jacket. So glad it was Gomer, Merrily tried to smile, but her lips took a while to respond. She felt insubstantial, weightless as a butterfly, and just as transient. She gripped the rounded rim of the tombstone, needing gravity.
‘Wanner get some hot tea down you, girl.’ Gomer’s fingers were rolling a ciggy on the T-handle of the spade.
Now in semi-retirement from his long-time business of digging field drains and cesspits, Gomer saw to the graveyard, where his Minnie lay, and kept the church orchard pruned and tidy. Also, without making much of a thing out of it, he reckoned it was part of his function to look out for the vicar. This vicar, anyway. Been through some situations together, she and Gomer. But still she couldn’t tell him why she’d been in the church tonight or what had happened in there.
The colour of the sky alarmed her. It was streaked with orange cream, laying a strange glare on Gomer’s bottle glasses. Merrily pushed her fingers through her hair. It felt matted with dried sweat.
‘Time… time is it, Gomer?’
‘Time?’ He looked up at the sky behind the steeple. ‘All but five now, sure t’be.’
‘Five in the morning?’
Her knees felt numb. Strips of… of sun were alight between layers of cloud like Venetian blinds over the hills.
Gomer struck a match on a headstone. ‘That Mrs Griffiths, it was, phoned me. Her don’t sleep much n’more since her ol’ man snuffed it. Reckoned there was some bugger in the church, ennit? Bit of a glow up the east window, see. Vicar? What’s wrong?’
‘It can’t be.’ Merrily was shaking her head, frenziedly. Her face felt stiff. ‘It can’t be. I’ve only been—Gomer, I…’ She clutched his arm. ‘I went in there… maybe an hour ago. An hour and a half at the most. It was about ten o’clock… ten-thirty.’
And then the earth turned.
The molten copper of the dawn sent terrifying pulses into Merrily’s head.
Gomer patted her hand.
‘Young Jane… Her’s gone away, then?’
‘Huh?’
