The Cure of Souls

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Mother of God!’ Al half rose, the wine spilled and the candle flame wavered.

  ‘Not that I was actually advocating that,’ Lol said. ‘Just making the point.’

  ‘Valid. Quite valid.’ Al shook his head sadly, sat down and topped up his glass again. ‘I’m no businessman, Lol, and no chovihano – I’ve lived too long in gaujoland. But I try to honour the old code… which is about living lightly on the earth, taking what you need, taking selectively, taking secretly sometimes. Taking in a way so that nobody notices that what you’ve taken has gone. It’s not quite stealing… if nobody notices it’s not there any more.’

  This was questionable morality, but Merrily was too tired to ask the questions. She sipped some of the sweet soft drink that Sally had brought her. It apparently contained hops and nettles.

  ‘You want to know the truth of it, I’m still paying back.’ Al drained his wineglass in one. ‘I’m paying back for the one time when I took… and it was noticed. How could it fail to be bloody well noticed? And that’s how I brought a curse upon my own family, why I live among the gaujos and keep my head down. It’s why we have a museum devoted to hops, and most of the Romany memorabilia’s in the back room, behind a locked door.’

  Sally Boswell said in a low voice, ‘You could have paid.’

  ‘You get off my back,’ Al growled.

  There was an uncomfortable silence. A bat flittered in an arc over the table. Merrily had one more question.

  ‘What about a wheel with a tree through it?’

  Al looked up. ‘Where did you see that?’

  ‘It was a design on a rug. In the house of the man with the wealth talisman.’

  ‘Nothing particularly to do with wealth.’ He poured the last of the wine, a dribble, and pulled over another bottle. ‘The wheel would be the medicine wheel. The tree is the Tree of Life. Comes in three sections. The branches are in the Upper World of vision and inspiration. The middle, where the wheel goes through, is about our life and dealing with it. The roots are in the lower world of the ancestors… and the dead.’

  ‘The gypsy dead aren’t in the Upper World?’

  Al smiled ruefully.

  Sally said, ‘Not all gypsies believe in a heaven. And anyway, the dead are gone, and must stay gone. The dead are unhealthy. Death pollutes a place meant for living, so when someone was dying it used to be that they were taken out of their home and put in a tent or a bender. The person is always washed and dressed in fresh clothes before death.’ It was coming out pat now, Merrily thought – the museum curator’s voice. ‘Also, in Romany society, the names of recently dead people must never be mentioned lest this might call them back. At one time, when a gypsy died, his vardo would be set alight with all his possessions, so there would be nothing in this world to draw him back.’

  ‘Of course, these days,’ Al said, ‘the vardo is worth a lot of money, but it’s still usual for something to be ritually burned. Something closely associated with the dead person.’

  There was an important question here; Merrily couldn’t untangle it.

  Lol did. ‘So gypsies don’t try to communicate with the dead?’

  ‘Not recommended,’ Sally said.

  ‘But isn’t that what a shaman does – talks to the spirits?’

  Merrily nodded gratefully – this was it.

  ‘Their ancestors, mainly,’ Sally said, ‘which is different. Also spirits of nature. Spirits of living things. Everything has a spirit… this table, those trees, the River Frome.’

  ‘A guitar?’ Lol said.

  Al turned slowly. ‘Smart boy.’

  Merrily saw that Lol’s face was alight with understanding. ‘All the wood for each guitar, you take sparingly,’ he said, ‘so that it isn’t missed. So maybe even the tree doesn’t have to die?’

  ‘Aha.’ Al leaned back, a knuckle depressing his cheek, two fingers making a V around an ear.

  ‘So that the living spirit of the tree – or trees, all those different species – goes into the guitar,’ Lol said. ‘And maybe you consult the tree spirit first to make sure it’s OK to take the wood?’

  Al pointed a long forefinger. ‘And I’ll tell you something else, Lol, boy – if you ever bring that instrument back, you’ll be insulting those spirits… have you thought of that?’ He flung back his head and laughed. Directly above the table, Merrily was aware of the full moon, the colour of custard cream. It seemed warmer than the day had been, as if the moon was putting out its own heat.

  She said carefully, ‘So a gypsy who was attempting to arouse the dead, for whatever reason—’

  Sally said, ‘You know of a gypsy doing this?’

  ‘I know of somebody trying to do it. Somebody claiming to have a gypsy father.’

  ‘A poshrat?’ Al Boswell asked.

  ‘Sounds vaguely appropriate.’

  ‘Half-breed. Is this the same person seeking wealth?’

  ‘Seeking even more wealth would be more accurate. And ensuring his wealth involves damaging another person. A family, in fact.’

  ‘Have nothing to do with this person,’ Al said. ‘Erm… it’s my job, Mr Boswell.’

  His face was blank in the milky moon and candlelight. ‘What, at the end of it all, is so important about a bloody job?’

  ‘It’s a gaujo thing,’ Lol said.

  ‘Black magic,’ Al said flatly. ‘Raising the dead to damage another person or acquire wealth – that’s the black arts. And also, let me tell you, it’s far too stupid a thing for a traditional Romany ever to go near.’

  ‘There are no evil Romanies?’ Lol said.

  ‘You don’t understand, boy. Romanies respect, sometimes consult the ancestors. But they let the dead lie. Most of us don’t even like to touch a body after death. This is about fear.’ He leaned towards Merrily and into the candlelight, as if he was concerned that she should see how agitated he was. ‘Listen to me, drukerimaskri, I want to tell you – and this also concerns the other thing, the thing in the kiln – I want to say to you, don’t ever trust the dead.’

  In Merrily’s bag – she jumped – her phone began to shrill, just like it had in the Stocks’ bedroom when she could have sworn it was switched off. She didn’t touch the bag. ‘Go on,’ she said to Al.

  The phone went on bleeping – Al glancing nervously at the bag, as if this might be a spirit coming through.

  ‘I’ll get it if you like,’ Lol said. Merrily nodded gratefully, dug in the bag and pulled out the phone, handed it to him. Lol took it over to the boundary fence.

  ‘We have a word,’ Al said, and he whispered it. ‘Mulo. This is the Romany word for a ghost. The same word… this word is also used for a vampire: the living dead.’

  Sally Boswell was silently observing her husband’s melodramatics with a faintly sardonic expression, but her skin looked whiter than the moon.

  ‘The point being, I think, that we don’t see that much of a difference,’ Al said.

  Merrily didn’t know how to react to this. Was she supposed to say something inane about not all ghosts sucking your blood? The moon picked out a circle of pink, as perfect as a tonsure, on the crown of Al’s white head.

  ‘This is our dead I’m talking about. We don’t worry about your dead – we’ll settle down to sleep in your cemeteries any night of the week. We believe that the Romany dead… we believe they don’t come back for no reason. And they’ll leech off you. They’ll steal your life-energy. They’ll keep on taking it until you’re a cored and cancerous husk. We are very afraid, drukerimaskri, of the vengeful power of our dead.’

  She didn’t really know what he meant. She didn’t understand what he was saying to her.

  Lol came and sat down again, but said nothing. Nervously, Merrily drank some more of the nettles and hops. The night was suddenly swollen with tension.

  ‘Whatever it is,’ Sally said to Lol, ‘you’d better tell her. We’ll go away and leave you.’

  ‘No, it’s OK. It’s no big secret.’ Lol handed the phone across the tab
le to Merrily. ‘It was Sophie. The police are trying to get hold of you.’

  Merrily drew a fearful breath. She was thinking of Amy Shelbone… David Shelbone not answering his phone.

  ‘There’s been an incident at the remand centre in Shrewsbury where Gerard Stock was taken. He, um—’ Lol cleared his throat. ‘Stock’s hanged himself.’

  35

  Left to Hang

  THE TURNED HAY was a rich confection, baking under the moon. Merrily stood on the hard mud track that bisected the meadow below Prof’s place, the mobile damp against her ear, a cigarette in her other hand.

  The air was so very still and DCI Annie Howe’s voice so crisp and distinct and authoritative, it was like the news was being broadcast to the whole valley.

  ‘Easier for them to do it in remand centre,’ she explained, as if she was talking about laundry or something. ‘Fewer personal restrictions there. As they haven’t been convicted of anything, they’re not forced to wear prison clothing.’

  The full moon, Merrily was thinking, outraged. She and Lol had walked all the way back from the Boswell hop museum before she’d felt able to make the call to Hereford police. Why the hell don’t they watch them more carefully under a full moon?

  ‘Unfortunately, it’s not too infrequent an occurrence,’ Annie Howe said. ‘There’s more of an element of loneliness and despair among remand prisoners. But a man of Stock’s apparent intellect and resilience – I have to say I wouldn’t have expected it from him, and I do wonder what pushed him over the edge. Did he suddenly realize he enormity of what he’d done? Was it remorse? Or had something… perhaps altered his state of mind?’ Meaningful pause. ‘What do you think, Ms Watkins?’

  Merrily thought about the court scenario Lol and she had built from what they knew of the mind of Gerard Stock. She didn’t like Howe’s innuendo, but she let it go.

  ‘How did he do it?’

  ‘With his shirt,’ Annie Howe said. ‘The shirt was torn and soaked – he’d urinated on it and rolled it up tight.’

  ‘Not a cry for help, then,’ Merrily said dully.

  His white shirt. White for innocence. White for the side of the angels. Out in the endless darkness, Gerard Stock’s heavy body was revolving slowly, his feet inches from the floor. Don’t really know what the fuck you’re doing, do you? You’re a waste of time. Geddout. Stock revolving slowly for ever: an obscene enigma.

  ‘I do feel obliged to warn you,’ Howe said, ‘that all legal barriers must now be considered down. No impending court case any more, only inquests. No one’s freedom’s at stake, so the gates are wide open. The media can go in now, with all its fangs bared. You understand what I’m saying?’

  Merrily said nothing. She imagined Howe in her half-lit office, relishing the moment.

  ‘It means they can exploit the exorcism angle to the full,’ Howe said. ‘They can print whatever they like. I can’t stop them.’

  Even if you wanted to.

  ‘And it means, of course, that they’ll come after you, Ms Watkins. If they aren’t after you already.’

  ‘I expect you’ll give them a full description,’ Merrily said, ‘so they don’t miss me.’

  Everything under the full moon was bright and sharply defined: the crisp ridges of hay, a line of graceful poplars, Lol – still and compact, standing looking down at his trainers.

  ‘I should get some sleep,’ Howe said. ‘It’s been a fairly stressful couple of days for you, I imagine.’

  She didn’t say, But nothing compared with the stress to come.

  Eirion sat up in horror, staring around the moon-washed attic. ‘Oh my God. Oh my God.’ He bounced out of bed, ran to the window. ‘Look at it!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s bloody dark. It’s got to be after ten.’

  Jane put on the light. ‘Five past. No sweat.’ She looked at him, head to bare toes. She smiled. ‘Doesn’t take the little guy long to shrink, does it?’

  ‘Jane, I’m dead.’

  ‘I wouldn’t go that far.’ On the Mondrian walls, the moon spotlit the yellow rectangle and the blue square, and Jane sighed in some kind of weird rapture. ‘Irene, isn’t life sometimes so… really quite good, in spite of everything?’

  ‘It—’ Eirion came back and sat on the bed and tenderly stroked her hair. ‘Well, yes. Yes, it is. But there’s always a vague downside – like we fell asleep. We weren’t supposed to fall asleep afterwards, were we, Jane?’

  ‘It happens.’ Jane shrugged knowledgeably. ‘Release of sexual tension.’

  ‘Even if I leave now, I’m not going to get back until the early hours.’

  ‘So don’t leave.’

  ‘They’ll have locked me out.’

  ‘You’ve got a key.’

  ‘They’ll have barred the doors, out of entirely justified spite.’

  ‘Just say the car broke down.’

  ‘Jane, it’s a two-year-old BMW. It’s still under warranty. Plus, we didn’t even say we were going anywhere.’

  ‘You know what?’ Jane said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t actually care a lot.’ She linked her hands behind her head. She felt, like, all woman. ‘The car, your family… all this is so not a problem.’

  Eirion looked into her eyes.

  ‘And Amy Shelbone?’ he said.

  ‘Ah.’ Jane went quiet. That was a problem. Yes. Oh God.

  ‘I think we were going to see Amy, weren’t we?’ Eirion said. ‘Either before or after or instead of ringing your mum. If you recall, we looked up the address in the phone book. Some hours ago.’

  ‘Irene, what are we going to do?’ She was confused: part of her wildly happy, the rest horribly anxious, the combination bringing her to the brink of tears. ‘I mean what are we going to do about Amy now?’

  ‘Yes.’ He stood up again. ‘I guess we do have to do something.’

  ‘Because that would like destroy everything, wouldn’t it, if it—?’

  ‘Don’t go imagining things, Jane.’

  ‘Irene, that stuff… you couldn’t even imagine it.’ Everything came back to her, in the tough, no-shit tones of Kirsty Ryan: They’re really cooking, you know, her and the kid. She covered herself with the duvet, as if some astral Layla Riddock might be watching her from the shadows. ‘You couldn’t dream it up, could you?’

  ‘No.’ Eirion walked around, discovering into which corners he’d thrown his clothes. ‘How long would it take us to get over there?’

  ‘Dilwyn? Ten, fifteen minutes. But suppose she’s already in bed.’

  ‘Then she can get up, can’t she? At least if she’s in bed she’s not going to run away. Go on, get dressed. I won’t watch.’

  ‘You don’t want to watch?’

  ‘Yes, I’d love to watch. That’s’ – Eirion gathered up his jeans – ‘why I’m getting dressed in the bathroom.’

  ‘Irene?’ Jane slipped on her bra. Eirion paused at the door. ‘You will come in with me, won’t you? At the Shelbones’. You’re more likely to convince the parents than I am.’

  ‘Sure. We’re… an item, aren’t we? Official.’

  ‘I…’ Jane smiled a little stiffly, wondering how she felt about that, like, post-coitally. Hey!

  She reached down to the little pile of her clothes lying beside the bed.

  ‘Maybe he left a suicide note,’ Lol said.

  They were on the wooden footbridge. The river was down there somewhere, but even the full moon couldn’t find it. Lol was standing over the Frome which went nowhere in particular, maybe aching to join another river before it was too late.

  ‘If he refused to make a statement,’ Merrily said, ‘I don’t see him leaving a note, do you?’

  Lol didn’t have an answer to that. He couldn’t imagine why a man like that would ever have hanged himself – taking Gerard Stock out of the picture, robbing the world of a sensational trial at which he might easily have put up a strong defence, with Merrily Watkins left to hang.

  ‘Sophie men
tion the media?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So, do you want to risk staying here?’

  ‘Risk?’ She was wearing a blue cotton skirt, a top the colour of the moon, a small gold cross on a chain. She looked very small. ‘What are they going to do to me? The press are only people.’

  ‘In the pack, they tend to lose their humanity.’

  ‘We’ll see what happens. Look, I…’ She brought out her phone. ‘I’d better call David Shelbone again.’ She switched on the phone and the screen came up green. Merrily put in a number and listened. ‘Engaged.’

  ‘What was it Al told you?’ Lol said. ‘When I was taking the call. What was Al so keen to tell you?’

  ‘Oh, he’d… had a little too much wine.’

  ‘Something about not trusting the dead.’

  ‘He was talking about the gypsy dead. Romany ghosts. What he called the mulo. He said gypsies were terrified of their own ghosts, though they didn’t give a toss about ours. It didn’t seem entirely logical to me. But what do I know?’

  ‘He say anything about there being a presence in the kiln?’

  ‘Only in passing.’ She stepped onto the footpath on the other side of the bridge. ‘But it doesn’t matter now, does it? Nothing to explain to the Crown court. Just an inquest.’

  Lol followed her. ‘And yourself. If you can’t somehow explain it to yourself, you’ll never trust Deliverance again, will you?’

  ‘Well, sure, I’d rather have got myself shredded in the witness box, have the whole exorcism thing held up as some kind of tawdry medieval spoof, than lose another life.’ She waited for him by the first of the poplars, the moonlight on her face, shadows under her eyes. ‘Or maybe I’m fooling myself? Maybe I’m secretly glad he’s dead, because he’d already set me up and he was probably going to do it again.’

  ‘You don’t have it in you to be glad anyone’s dead,’ he said.

  ‘As a vicar.’

  ‘Not even – let’s be honest here – as a person.’

  ‘Oh, well, you – you kind of stop being a person when you join the Church,’ Merrily said. ‘You have to learn to suffocate your feelings.’