The Cure of Souls

by Phil Rickman

  Merrily said nothing.

  ‘Anyway, I thought I’d better check it out. There’s a lot of this stuff about the school lately – little witchcrafty groups popping up. Awfully childish. I don’t like to see kids playing at it. If you have psychic skills, it’s your responsibility to develop them sensibly. If you haven’t got it… don’t mess with it. So, yeah, I found them in this shed on one of the fields and I…’ Layla paused and smiled. ‘I’m afraid I arranged a little surprise.’

  Layla glanced around. Holding court, now. A dominant kind of girl, Robert Morrell had said. Perhaps the kind of girl where all the teaching staff, both sexes, would be relieved when she left school.

  It was hard to believe this woman was only about a year older than Jane.

  It was also hard to believe she’d want to waste time on a little girl like Amy Shelbone.

  ‘What did you do, Layla?’ Allan Henry was taking a back seat, playing the feed, the straight man – and proud to do it, Merrily thought.

  Which was interesting in itself.

  ‘I grassed them up,’ Layla said smugly. ‘I discreetly tipped off one of the staff. And there was a raid.’

  ‘Caught them at it?’ Allan Henry said.

  Layla put up both her hands. ‘Absolutely nothing to do with me!’ She wore five rings, all gold.

  Everyone was quiet. It was not so difficult to believe that Layla Riddock would consider her natural peers to be found among the staff rather than the pupils.

  Allan Henry glanced at Merrily and Sophie in turn again. He was smiling gently.

  Very mature for her age.

  ‘Good for you,’ Merrily said hoarsely to Layla, and the schoolgirl smiled at her, too, the tip of her tongue childishly touching a corner of her mouth. But her eyes were cold with malice. Merrily felt sure it was malice.

  You can’t touch us, the smile said. You can’t get near us.

  Neither of them said a word until they were in the lane, heading back towards Canon Pyon. Merrily was expecting a hard time. Stay away, Sophie had advised back in the office. What would be the point? And then, in the car, If I were you, I wouldn’t get out.

  When had Sophie ever not been right?

  She was looking at her most severe, sitting stiffly, eyes on the road, both hands positioned precisely on the wheel, like she was taking her driving test. Merrily sat with her bag on her knees, a hand inside playing with the cigarettes. She couldn’t keep the hand still.

  ‘I’m sorry, Sophie.’

  Sophie said nothing, but you could almost hear her thoughts ricocheting like pellets from the upholstery and the windscreen and the dash.

  ‘It was a very bad idea,’ Merrily said. ‘I should not have dragged you into it.’ She’d crushed a cigarette, strands of tobacco teased between fingers and thumb. ‘I don’t know how he’ll get back at us, but he will. I was useless in there. I let him walk all over us. A corrupt developer, a crook, and I let him… let them both walk all over us.’

  Sophie turned right, towards Hereford, and the car speeded up. A mile or so along the road, she said mildly, ‘They’re an item, aren’t they, those two?’

  The sky was flawless, the blue deepening. Across the edge of the city, you could see all the way to the hooked nose of The Skirrid, the holy mountain above Abergavenny.

  Merrily closed her bag on the tobacco mess. ‘I’m glad you said it first.’

  ‘Is Sandra really away on a cruise, I wonder?’

  ‘Maybe she’s buried in the garden. He can do anything, can’t he? He’s got everybody in his pocket, and now he’s sleeping with his stepdaughter!’ Merrily was momentarily horrified at how high her voice had risen.

  ‘He might sail close to the wind,’ Sophie said, ‘but he’s not stupid. I expect Sandra is on a cruise. Quite a long cruise.’

  ‘So you think she knows?’

  ‘Wouldn’t you?’

  ‘I wonder how long it’s been going on.’

  ‘A more interesting question is, which of them initiated it?’ Sophie said.

  A very lucky man, Charlie Howe had observed. Things’ve fallen his way.

  And people have fallen out of his way.

  Sophie said, ‘The girl was lying rather cleverly, wasn’t she?’

  ‘Beautifully. Forget about the trinkets, that’s probably the best evidence of genuine Romany ancestry.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘They’re supposed to consider it an art form.’

  ‘Lying?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘And what else do you know about them?’

  ‘Not enough. Not yet, anyway.’

  ‘Well, forget about it for tonight,’ Sophie said. ‘Get a good night’s sleep. If Inspector Howe or anyone else rings wanting to speak to you, I’ll put them off.’

  ‘No, put them through.’

  ‘You’re getting personally involved. That’s not helpful to anyone.’

  ‘I am personally involved. And now there’s a child missing.’

  Only two, three years between Amy Shelbone and Layla Riddock, but one was a child and one was a woman. Merrily folded her hands in her lap, couldn’t keep them still. A teenage girl had done this to her. She closed her eyes, breathed in.

  ‘Sophie,’ she said. ‘Could I possibly have a cigarette?’

  34

  The Cure of Souls

  ‘HA,’ HE SAID. ‘The drukerimaskri.’

  He seemed to be dancing in the last of the dusk, will-o’-thewispish. The late evening was rich and close, the atmosphere laden with herbal scents. There was going to be a full moon.

  Merrily said, ‘Drukeri—?’

  ‘—maskri. It’s a Romany term.’ Al Boswell’s white hair flurried as he did a little bow. She suspected he was mocking her.

  A lantern hung from the bowed roof of the vardo, a thick candle inside it. On the grass in front of the wagon, a heavy wooden table was set up, with bentwood chairs. A shaggy donkey browsed nearby. In the distance, beyond the building housing the hop museum, glittered the tiered lights of Malvern.

  Al Boswell presented himself in front of Lol, hands behind his back. ‘Where’s your guitar? Why didn’t you bring your guitar? We could have played for the moon.’

  Lol told him Prof had insisted the guitar was a short-term loan. ‘Besides, it didn’t seem—’

  ‘Appropriate?’ Al Boswell arched his back like a thin, white cat. ‘Relevant? Seemly?’

  ‘All those,’ Lol said. ‘Plus—’

  ‘You can’t surely be afraid to play alongside an old man whose arthriticky fingers slur drunkenly over the frets?’

  ‘Tonight, I can manage without total humiliation,’ Lol admitted.

  ‘Certainly not in the presence of the lovely drukerimaskri.’

  I am not going to ask what it means, Merrily thought.

  ‘Or are you afraid the drukerimaskri would think it was wrong to play for the moon? And besides, look at her: she’s in a hurry, there’s no time, she’s on hot bricks, she needs the information. Therefore, she might find you… trivial.’ Al Boswell walked right up to Lol, peered into his eyes. ‘And that would never do.’

  ‘Al, for God’s sake!’ The beautiful, frail silvery woman in the long skirt came down the steps of the wagon, carrying a tray with glasses on it. ‘He’s such a terrible walking cliché sometimes,’ she said to Merrily. ‘Except, of course, in the presence of other Romanies, on which rare occasions he’s almost withdrawn.’

  ‘She’s such a bitch tonight!’ Al Boswell howled. He took Lol on one side. ‘So, have you heard from Levin?’

  The donkey had ambled up to Merrily and she ran her fingers through his heavy fur and gazed into his billiard-ball eyes. There was an unreality about the night or perhaps a hyper-reality – a sensual intensity she hadn’t been prepared for. Lol had brought her here, and suddenly she wanted Lol to take her away again; she wanted to be alone with him. Things needed to be said, worked out, if that were possible.

  ‘You’re terribly tense, aren’t you?’
Mrs Boswell was standing next to her. ‘And exhausted? I’m going to fetch you something that might help.’

  ‘No, honestly, it’s…’ Merrily let the donkey nibble at the sleeve of her jacket. ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Stanley.’

  ‘Does that mean something in Romany?’

  ‘I do hope not.’

  Merrily smiled. A wave of tiredness washed over her, and the lights of Malvern blurred.

  ‘About Stock.’ Mrs Boswell looked insubstantial in the dusk – like steam, like a ghost. But for the glasses on a chain, you felt you could have put a hand through her. ‘There’s nothing you could have done. It shouldn’t have been allowed to happen, but there’s nothing you could have done. You weren’t to know.’

  ‘Know what?’

  Mrs Boswell didn’t reply. Merrily let it go: a false trail, probably. This woman didn’t look at all like a gypsy but she’d been married to one for many years.

  ‘What’s a drukerimaskri?’ Merrily said.

  ‘Al called you that? Originally, I think, it meant soothsayer. Then it became applied to Christian priests who could lay spirits to rest. Drukerimaskro is the more familiar form, in the masculine: an exorcist, a healer of souls.’

  Merrily held on to the donkey and looked for Lol.

  Healer of souls.

  The song had been happening when she got back to Knight’s Frome just after seven p.m.

  She’d insisted on driving back in the Volvo – which had meant first returning to the office and submitting to two cups of sweet tea, a biscuit, a paracetamol and a dissertation on the parameters of responsibility.

  ‘The Bishop’s back tomorrow,’ Sophie had reminded her, finally seeing her to the car. ‘I’m going to advise him to put off the inevitable formal meeting with you until next week.’

  ‘I’d rather get it over with.’

  ‘And admit to things for which you were not to blame?’ Sophie held open the door of the Volvo. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘If I lose the job, I lose the job. There were things I got wrong. I’m not just going to keep denying everything to preserve my… dubious status.’

  ‘Merrily,’ Sophie said very clearly, ‘I have to tell you I’d be more than pleased – for your sake, at least – if you were to leave Deliverance behind for ever.’ Merrily stared at her in dismay. ‘But certainly not under the present circumstances. I’d never forgive myself if you went down for either Gerard Stock or Allan Henry and Layla Riddock. Now go back and get an early night. I’ll talk to you in the morning.’

  Sophie pushed the car door closed – except it didn’t; this was an old car and you had to slam the door. Merrily opened it again to do that, overheard what Sophie was muttering to herself as she walked away.

  She’d sat there with the door hanging open – maybe her mouth as well – until Sophie was out of sight. Then, to avoid having to think, she’d snatched the mobile and called David Shelbone at home, intending this time to insist he get the police in.

  No answer. In the silence of the Bishop’s Palace yard, she’d prayed for the Shelbones and then started the car and put on the stereo very loud, something sparking with ideas but not too profound: Gomez – Abandoned Shopping Trolley Hotline.

  At 7.03 p.m., she’d driven out of the lane from Knight’s Frome and on to the now-familiar track, parking the Volvo between the stables and the cottage. Lol’s Astra sat there, years older than the trees Prof Levin had planted to screen off his studio. In Prof’s absence, nature was running things again – green hazelnuts in the uncut boundary hedge and a gold-dust haze on the seeded long grass of what was supposed to be a lawn.

  The stable door was open, and Merrily went into the kitchen area, putting down her bag on the breakfast-bar packing case, walking down the short passage to the studio door. It was ajar. She peered through the gap.

  Some of the stable remained as it had been, three of the stalls turned into recording booths. Lol was sitting in one, his back to the door, a guitar on his knee. On the smaller of the two tape machines to her left, she could see spools revolving. He’d be laying down a demo for Prof Levin. She knew he’d had his orders.

  There was a pair of headphones hanging from a metal bracket beside the tape machine. She could hear the tinnitus buzz of music and she slipped off her shoes and padded across. The air was still and warm. Feeling like whatever was the aural equivalent of a voyeur, she slipped on the cans.

  The music stopped. ‘Shit,’ Lol murmured wearily into her head. There was silence, then a string was retuned. The crisp acoustic was frighteningly intimate: she could hear his breathing, the movements of his fingers on the machine-heads.

  Lol said, ‘Take six.’

  The guitar, in minor chord, was awesomely deep and full – this kind of weighted fingerstyle sounding like a piano. She felt like she was inside the soundbox and somehow also inside the heart of the guitarist, and tears came into her eyes as Lol’s voice came in, low and nasal and smoky, and the first shockingly resonant line fell like a stone into a deep, deep well.

  ‘As you kneel before your altar—’

  Merrily froze. Lol stopped. He cleared his throat. He sighed.

  ‘Seven,’ he said.

  Merrily had been holding on to the sides of the tape deck, as if she was part of the machine, recording it, too, every softly explosive, questioning phrase. She recalled Lol waiting for her in the dappled quiet of the church at Knight’s Frome, re-experienced his expression of loss as she emerged from the vestry as a priest.

  He began again.

  ‘As you kneel before your altar,

  Can you see the wider plan?

  Can you hear the one you’re talking to?

  Can you love him like a man?

  Did you suffocate your feelings

  As you redefined your goals

  And vowed to undertake the Cure of Souls…?’

  Merrily had hung up the cans and walked rapidly out of the stable with her shoes under her arm, the stones and baked mud brutal on the soles of her feet.

  ‘The Black Virgin,’ Al Boswell said. ‘Sara la Kali.’

  Candles in bottles dramatized his goblin profile. He’d calmed down now, after a couple of glasses of wine, and the four of them were sitting around the wooden table outside the vardo.

  ‘Medieval French saint,’ Merrily recalled. ‘Linked to Mary Magdalene. A servant?’ Was this the woman in the unlikely picture on Allan Henry’s sitting room wall?

  ‘Gypsies in France became strongly identified with the Catholic pilgrimage of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mere in the Camargue,’ Sally Boswell said. ‘This is where the three Marys – Mary Salomé, Mary Jacobé and Mary Magdalene were said to have landed and where their relics are presumed to have been found under the church… and later, in a bronze chest, the remains of their black servant, Sara.’

  ‘Why did the gypsies adopt this Sara?’ Lol leaned away from the candlelight, his elbows on the table hiding the holes in the famous alien sweatshirt.

  ‘They’re a great paradox, the Rom,’ said Sally Boswell. ‘Flamboyant, volatile, and yet subtle and secretive. They were pagans originally – some still are, but most adopted the dominant religion of whichever country they travelled. They may have chosen Sara because she was the humblest of the saints, the most unassuming… the least obtrusive.’

  Lol nodded. He would understand that. Given the options, she’d have been his patron saint as well, Merrily thought, tears pricking again. She was overtired, that was the problem.

  ‘Or,’ Sally went on, ‘they may have seen her as a Christian incarnation of the Hindu goddess, Kali. There was talk of blood sacrifice, but I think that’s an exaggeration or a corruption of the truth.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Merrily said.

  After leaving the studio, she’d walked through the fields for a while before going up to her cell in the cottage. She’d washed and changed, come down, and then she and Lol had raided Prof’s fridge for scraps of salad, while she told him about Layla Riddock and Allan Henry a
nd the objects in the big white room, the picture on the wall, the conclusion she and Sophie had come to. And then Lol had suggested Al and Sally Boswell might throw some more light on this, and he’d phoned them.

  ‘Can I ask you about some symbols?’ she said to Al. ‘The wheel, for instance.’

  ‘On its own?’

  ‘Like a cartwheel. With spokes.’

  Al glanced at his wife.

  ‘Money,’ she said. ‘Wealth.’

  ‘So a gold talisman with a wheel engraved on it, worn around the neck…?’

  ‘Would obviously be designed to promote wealth.’

  ‘I wouldn’t wear one.’ Al poured himself more wine.

  ‘OK.’ Merrily moved on. ‘A group of objects: acorns, dice, a rabbit’s foot – oh, and a magnet.’

  Al drank, then put down his glass. ‘To which you might want to add a few gold coins – and a magnifying glass. Because this person, whoever it is, wants – or needs – considerable wealth.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t you wear the talisman?’ Merrily asked.

  ‘You would want unearned wealth, little drukerimaskri?’

  ‘But you’re not a priest.’

  His eyes flashed. ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Sorry. I don’t know that.’

  He sniffed sharply. ‘My father was a chovihano. Well-known guy – a shaman, a healer. A healer of souls and bodies and the living and the dead. Not many left in the world now.’

  ‘It’s hereditary?’

  He looked glum. ‘Sometimes. But you need to work at it. It’s a calling, a commitment. You’d understand that. Me… I was a disappointment to my family.’ He offered the bottle round, got no takers, poured more wine for himself. ‘No, you’re quite right, I’m not a priest.’

  ‘You’re not rich, either,’ Lol said. ‘You don’t make enough guitars. You could have had a Boswell guitar factory turning out thousands, like – I dunno – the Martin family?’