The Cure of Souls

by Phil Rickman

  ‘I can understand your bitterness,’ he said at last.

  ‘Wouldn’t call it that, exactly. I really admire your ability to tell people with problems exactly where they can shove them. I think it’s an enviable quality in a clergyman.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘if you do feel inclined to help, we’ll be meeting at the Hop Museum between ten and ten-thirty.’

  ‘Tonight?’

  ‘This morning. It has to be done at noon.’

  ‘What does?

  ‘Al and I agreed this seems to require a more… customized procedure. There’s a traditional Romany form of exorcism. I believe they have a word or phrase meaning soul-retrieval, but I’m buggered if I can remember it.’

  A shadow fell across the desk. She turned in her chair. Eirion stood there. ‘Oh.’ He backed away. ‘I didn’t… sorry.’

  She waved to Eirion that it was OK. ‘It’s all a bit of a rush, isn’t it?’ she said to Simon St John.

  ‘Well, it…’ She picked up either crackle on the line or some agitation. ‘Al’s in a state. A bad way. And I suppose I’m—’

  ‘What time did you say?’

  ‘Midday.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it has to be. Al will explain. We were planning to meet as soon after ten as possible.’

  ‘I don’t know if I can make that.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘I just… thank you for your—’

  And now he did hang up.

  Lol grabbed the ringing phone, hoping it was Merrily. He’d given up trying to call her at the vicarage. Last night/this morning, he’d forgotten to ask for her mobile number. He hadn’t been to bed. He was rediscovering, on the far shores of fatigue, a state of heightened consciousness produced by a cocktail of body chemicals that he suspected was only rarely mixed. It happened sometimes after a whole night in the studio. Afterwards, the hangover would be awesome, but right now he was floating on a luminous pool of awareness.

  ‘Good morning, Laurence,’ Frannie Bliss said briskly. ‘You’re up then. Gorra pen?’

  ‘Not on me.’

  ‘Good. Don’t get one.’ There was the unmuffled sound of main-road traffic; Bliss was clearly outside, on a mobile. ‘Some night, then, in the end, eh? Quite a few added complications to this Shelbone business, sounds like. What’s Merrily’s take on it?’

  ‘Haven’t spoken to her for a few hours.’

  ‘Never mind, not my case anyway. Let’s leave that alone; time’s short. I got in early this morning, couldn’t sleep – bloody full moon. And I was thinking about what you were saying, about Mrs Stock. So I had another look in Stock’s computer – we brought his computer in; fascinating, all the things a computer’ll tell you about its owner. I got into his Internet files – you click on “history” and the computer very kindly tells yer all the Web sites Stock and his missus have been into the last months or so. Now, what was the general subject that most interested one or the other or both of them over the past few weeks?’

  ‘Gypsies?’

  ‘You’re on the ball this morning, son. Aye, there’s about ten files on the general subject of gypsies. Which I already knew about, of course – and no big mystery there because that was Mr Ash’s main interest, too. But I did begin to detect another element coming through. Either Stock or Mrs Stock was going back to the same sites, following up particular angles. Gypsies and Death was a popular one, gypsy death rituals and gypsy ghosts and evil spirits.’

  ‘The mulo?’

  ‘Exactly. The living dead. You wouldn’t want one, would you? The female version might be all right at first, but she’d start to wear yer out after a while. Couldn’t keep up, could you. Go bloody mad.’

  ‘Especially if you were already having problems down there.’

  ‘Precisely. Now – what would you do to get rid of it? Several suggestions came up on this one particular Web site – you could drive steel or iron needles into the heart of the corpse, or a hawthorn stake through one of its legs. Or you could simply… chop its head off. Isn’t that interesting?’

  ‘It is, isn’t it?’ Lol said soberly.

  ‘Course, this is corpses, and I think we can assume Mrs Stock was not one of the walking dead. But then if, as you suggest, the normally rational Gerard had come to believe his wife had been taken over by one of these things, and if she was making demands on him he was failing to satisfy – and if he’d got in an exorcist to sort her out…’

  ‘And if, the minute the exorcist had left the premises, Stephanie appeared to be unaffected or even…’

  ‘Go on.’

  Perhaps even perversely stimulated by it, Lol thought.

  ‘Maybe prayers focused on helping Stewart Ash didn’t quite hit the spot,’ he said. ‘But how was Merrily to know that?’

  ‘How indeed? Because Stock wasn’t telling the truth, was he?’

  ‘Why break the habit of a lifetime? You going to tell Howe about this?’

  ‘Not yet. Anyway, it might not have the desired effect coming from me. She’s the governor, she decides what line we take. She could tell me to leave the gypsy stuff alone, and that’s me silenced.’

  ‘Would she?’

  ‘She might. But let’s talk about the disappearance of this gypsy girl in the autumn of sixty-three and the recent murder of Stewart Ash. What’s the connecting factor between these two events?’

  ‘There is one?’

  ‘There is, my son, long as we agree you never heard it from me.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Lol said. ‘Who are you, again?’

  ‘Good boy. Listen, this is something I can’t help you with beyond what I’m about to say. Might be something or nothing. Either way, you’ll have to follow it up for yourself. Cherished reputations at stake. I didn’t go through official channels, because you leave tracks that way, but I did put in a call, first thing, to a former copper, who I won’t name, who used to be based at Bromyard and, as it happened, was one of the PCs involved in what you could describe as the less-than-intensive search for Rebekah Smith. And who, as a local man, was well aware of all the rumours about the womanizing activities of the late Mr Conrad Lake. You with me?’

  ‘All the way,’ Lol said.

  Merrily brought some tea over to Eirion at the kitchen table.

  ‘How is it?’

  ‘Oh, you know, bit sore… stiff.’

  ‘Couldn’t sleep?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Is there anything I can do?’

  ‘Well, I’m supposed to go back and have the dressing changed this afternoon.’

  ‘That’s not quite what I meant.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Can we talk?’

  ‘We can try.’ Merrily sat down.

  The dressing was on his upper arm, just below the shoulder. The woman doctor in Accident and Emergency, stitching up the gash, had said the point of the blade didn’t seem to have quite penetrated to the bone. Dafydd Lewis had started saying he’d come over at once, take the boy back to Withybush Hospital at Haverfordwest, but Eirion had insisted he wanted to stay here and see this through. Besides, he assumed the police would want to talk to him again.

  ‘Anyway, I don’t deserve any sleep,’ he said to Merrily. ‘If we’d stayed out of it, this would never have happened.’

  ‘You should never say that. Perhaps something even worse might’ve happened.’

  ‘Personally,’ Eirion said, ‘I really can’t conceive of anything worse than what did happen. How’s Jane?’

  ‘Sleeping.’ She’d put Eirion in one of the bedrooms on the first floor.

  ‘Jane’s in a bad way about this,’ he said.

  ‘I know. She thinks she was guilty of rather demonizing Layla.’

  It was the first thing Jane had said when Merrily and Lol had arrived at the Barnchurch: Mum, I got her deeply, deeply wrong. We started talking, and gradually she was like really normal – like a friend, a mate… oh God! Jane was looking like the time when, as a very small girl, she’d found a pot of raspber
ry jam and got it all over her face and down her front; only it wasn’t jam this time and it was even in her hair, so much of it that Merrily’d panicked and thought she must have been stabbed, too, and hadn’t bothered to tell the paramedics. Layla died. Mum, I watched her dying. I watched her heaving and shivering and struggling for breath… Oh, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus…

  In fact, Layla had passed away in the ambulance: multiple stab wounds, at least one believed to have penetrated a lung. It was Eirion who’d had to watch her die on the way to Casualty – the ambulance leaving as the fire engines came in.

  The Barnchurch had burned to a shell. The flames had already been into the rafters when Jane and the wounded Eirion had brought Layla out.

  ‘The kid must have been behind that screen the whole time,’ he said now. ‘Clutching her knife. What was she doing with a knife?’

  ‘Well, I – I believe her mother, Justine, used to take a kitchen knife with her as protection when she went to a local church to hide from Amy’s father. This was the knife he ended up using on her.’

  ‘I couldn’t believe the… strength in her. She was like a wildcat, a puma or something. The flames behind her. That white party dress. It was terrifying – sort of elemental. I was just shaking all over, afterwards. I’m sure I’m going to see her in nightmares for the rest of my life.’

  ‘It’ll fade, Eirion, I promise. Erm… I know the police have asked you this, but what do you think brought it on?’

  Eirion drank some tea, trying not to move his injured arm. ‘I’ve thought about it a lot more, obviously, since I talked to the police. I suppose, if you were looking for an ordinary, rational explanation, you’d have to say it was because of what Layla had been telling us. She wasn’t being particularly polite about Amy. One of the last things she said before it happened, she called Amy a monster and said perhaps it wouldn’t be a bad thing if she was put into care.’

  Merrily nodded. ‘Mmm. And if we weren’t looking for an ordinary, rational explanation…?’

  ‘Well, earlier, Layla told us how the spiritualism thing had started with her stepfather, Allan, finding out about Amy’s history when he was looking for some dirt on Mr Shelbone because—’

  ‘It’s OK, I know about that.’

  ‘And then Layla got excited because she assumed she was doing it, that it was coming through her. But then, the further they went with it, the more they realized that it was actually Amy—’

  ‘Amy?’

  ‘Layla said Amy was this incredible natural medium. It was Amy who had… raised her mother, if you like.’ Eirion drank more tea. ‘I think Layla had the idea that if she stuck with Amy, kind of supervising her progress, then she’d see some, you know, amazing things. She said – this is all a bit creepy for me, Mrs Watkins, but she said that it seemed like Justine had been about to kind of, you know, manifest. Which was why they were here on the night of the full moon, because there’d been one the night Justine died.’

  ‘And Layla was convinced Amy was the real medium?’

  ‘She said she’d been trying to develop her own psychic side for years, and suddenly here was this awful, repressed little girl who was a natural. She said she was quite jealous. That’s more or less what she said. Does this mean Amy could be in some way possessed?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Merrily was thinking back to the intense, truncated night in her own church when an eighteenth-century penny had supposedly given her God’s spin on the problem: no demonic possession in this case, no possession by an unquiet spirit. ‘I suppose,’ she said, clutching another of those slender straws frequently offered to you by faith, ‘that mediumship and spiritual possession are separated by a degree of control. The medium consents to open herself to the spirit, knowing she can always close the door.’

  ‘That’s more or less what Layla said.’

  ‘Except we’re not talking about Betty Shine here, we’re talking about a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl, and a fairly archaic example of the species at that – impressionable, naive—’

  ‘Will she be charged with murder?’

  ‘I don’t see how they can avoid it.’

  She was momentarily haunted again by thoughts she’d kept pushing away, about the similarities between this killing and Stock’s murder of his wife. In fact, when you examined them individually, the similarities were not so great, since the Romany element was peripheral to the Shelbone issue. To an outsider, the strongest link between the two cases would be herself: Deliverance – failed.

  ‘It’s tragic,’ Eirion said. ‘When you think about it, it’s tragic for everyone. Layla Riddock – she was about the same age as me, and she was…’ There were tears in his eyes. ‘She was obviously incredibly intelligent. And there she was, one minute coolly analysing the situation, the next coughing up all that blood, and then in the ambulance… What a terrible waste, Mrs Watkins. I’ve heard people say that so many times, but when you actually—’

  ‘Eirion,’ Merrily said, ‘you really are a nice guy. You risk alienating your family to pursue Jane’s whim, you—’

  ‘No, I’m not.’ He stared at her, blinking in agony. ‘I slept with your daughter!’

  His features slumped into comical dejection, like a boxer puppy’s.

  ‘I see,’ Merrily said softly.

  ‘Last night – well, evening. It was the first time. It was why we were so late getting to the Shelbones. We fell asleep. You see, that’s another thing – retribution. If we hadn’t… been to bed, we’d have got there earlier – and Layla might still be alive. It’s retribution.’

  ‘I really don’t think so.’ Suddenly she wanted to laugh. She’d often thought about what she’d say in this situation, and now she didn’t know what she wanted to say. Except… ‘Well… thanks for telling me.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Eirion said.

  ‘Well, you know, it’s not—’

  ‘I do love Jane, you see.’

  ‘Yeah. That’s, er, that’s the impression I already had.’

  ‘I mean, it wasn’t… casual sex. I’m a not a very casual sort of bloke.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘In fact this was the… you know, the first time.’

  ‘You said.’

  ‘No, I mean for me. For me, too.’

  ‘I see. Does Jane know that?’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘that’s probably not the impression I’ve given her, no.’

  ‘I won’t tell her, then.’

  ‘That’s very good of you.’

  ‘But just… just take good care of her. You know what I’m saying?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘I was only about three years older than you when I was pregnant, so I’ve tended not to come on heavy with Jane, so as to avoid any mention of pots, kettles and the colour black.’

  He smiled tentatively. On the shelf beside the Aga, Merrily’s mobile began to bleep.

  ‘Excuse me a sec.’

  Sophie sounded as if she had a cold.

  This was the Sophie who never seemed to get colds, not even in winter.

  ‘I’m afraid the Bishop’s back,’ she said.

  ‘Good.’ Merrily lied, carrying the mobile to the window.

  ‘A short time ago, we took a call from the Church of England Press Office, which has learned of inquiries from West Mercia Police – and also, I understand, from the Crown Prosecution Service – about the Church’s guidelines on exorcism. Do you know anything about this, Merrily?’

  ‘Not a thing.’ Merrily stood looking out over the vicarage garden. This was only their second summer here; it seemed like half a lifetime.

  ‘The Press Office also understands there may be a statement from West Mercia very soon, expressing dismay at the way the Church of England reacted to the Stock case. The upshot is likely to be a call for the Church to be held more directly answerable for the effects of what’s been described as “irresponsible ministry”.’

  ‘But doesn’t this pre-empt the result of the inquest? Isn’t it usually the coroner wh
o makes comments like that?’

  ‘I think it’s more of a reaction from the police to an impending onslaught by the media. It could be weeks or months before the inquest’s over. Anyway, the Diocese needs to prepare a counter statement, so an emergency meeting’s been called at the Bishop’s Palace for this morning. The Bishop needs to hear your explanations, in considerable detail, to decide if any of it’s—’

  ‘Rational enough to repeat. Hang on, you just said the Crown Prosecution Service. But Stock’s dead, so there’s no prosecution, only the inquest. Why should the CPS—? Oh.’

  ‘Quite,’ Sophie said.

  ‘Oh my God.’ Merrily went cold.

  ‘It doesn’t necessarily mean anyone’s contemplating prosecuting either the Church or… or…’

  ‘Or me.’

  ‘I’m very sorry to have to drop this on you, Merrily.’

  ‘Hardly your fault.’ How could it have come to this?

  ‘The meeting’s at eleven a.m.,’ Sophie said, ‘on the dot. If I were you, I’d—’

  ‘Sophie, perhaps… you could make my apologies.’

  Pause. She counted six, seven, eight, nine little green cider apples on the lawn.

  Sophie said, ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘I’ve got another appointment, that’s all.’

  ‘Merrily, let’s be perfectly clear about this: you do realize what your non-appearance would be taken to imply, don’t you?’

  ‘Things have happened. Don’t suppose the news has reached the Cathedral close yet.’

  ‘News?’

  ‘Allan Henry’s stepdaughter, Layla – you remember Layla? Black kimono, champagne glass? Layla was stabbed to death early this morning by Amy Shelbone. Who also injured Eirion.’

  ‘What?’ Sophie’s voice was faint and fractured, like the crinkling of tissue paper.

  ‘That’s actually not the reason I won’t be able to make it to the meeting,’ Merrily said. ‘But I thought you should know.’

  Lol picked up his keys, locked the stables and drove the Astra up the lane. Despite the window being wound all the way down, the day was already too hot for him. Already, he felt oppressed.

  On his way through Knight’s Frome, he spotted Simon St John standing on the humpback bridge. Simon started flagging him down.