by Phil Rickman
‘I’m sorry, Lol.’ He was wearing a black shirt and a dog collar and very old jeans. He was sweating, and his hair looked like the leaves of a long-abandoned house plant. ‘Whatever I said to you the other night, I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t you remember?’
‘Whatever it was, it was probably offensive and I’m sorry.’ Simon squinted, the sun directly in his eyes, but he made no effort to avoid it. ‘Have you spoken to Mrs Watkins today?’
‘Not since first light.’
‘Lol, I need her.’
Lol stared at him, said nothing.
‘I’m in a lot of trouble.’ Simon’s eyes were glassy with sunlight and anxiety. ‘I phoned her and asked her to come over, but I’m not sure she’s going to.’
‘Tell me,’ Lol said. He didn’t have that much time but if this involved Merrily he wanted to know about it.
‘It’s a priest thing.’ Simon started to laugh. ‘Oh, fucking hell…’
‘Why do you swear so much, Simon?’
‘Denial. I’m a sick, polluted priest in denial. Pity me, Lol, we’re not exactly twin souls, you and I, but I guess we’ve been to some of the same places. In my case complicated from time to time, as you may have heard, by a certain sexual ambivalence – but, then, in the seventies and eighties an entirely heterosexual rock musician was considered a serious pervert.’
‘That’s not the pollution, though, is it?’ Lol said from his vantage point on the hill of no sleep. What was the point of all this confessional stuff? It was as though Simon was desperate to convey sincerity, openness.
‘Oh no,’ the vicar said, ‘physical pressures I can control. He turned his head and stared at the bridge, the church, the roofs of the village. ‘This bloody place!’
Lol suddenly thought of Isabel in the churchyard. Seemed such a nice boring place, it did, after Wales. No historical baggage. No history at all that wasn’t to do with hops. Perfect, it was. And now – blood everywhere.
‘I’m horribly, horribly sensitive, Lol,’ Simon said. ‘That’s my problem. Like people with a skin condition who can’t go out in the sun. Will you tell her that?’
Eirion saw she had other preoccupations and said perhaps he’d take a walk around the village. When he’d gone, Merrily phoned Huw Owen over in the Brecon Beacons.
‘Aye,’ he said. ‘Wondered if you’d be calling one of these days. We do get the papers up here – not necessarily the same day, mind. Anyroad, say nowt, that’s my advice. When the trial date’s set, we’ll happen have a chat about it.’
‘There won’t be a trial. He hanged himself last night.’
‘Who?’
‘Stock. In his cell at the remand centre.’
‘Simplifies things,’ Huw said.
‘No, it doesn’t.’
‘You can get yourself through an inquest. You can tell the coroner why any comparisons with the Taylor case are inappropriate.’
‘No. I mean, yes, all that’s very much on the cards, and I’m really trying not to think about it yet. But to complicate things, informed sources at Knight’s Frome are suggesting there’s a remaining problem.’
‘At this kiln place?’
‘That the killing happened not because Stock was in any way possessed, but because his wife was.’
‘By what?’
‘A gypsy girl went missing, back in the sixties. There’s reason to think she was imprisoned in the kiln and either strangled or choked to death on sulphur, and then her body was burned in the furnace. All I wanted to ask is, have you had any dealings with, or do you know anything about, Romany beliefs?’
‘Specifically?’
‘Specifically, the mulo.’
He didn’t say he had, he didn’t say he hadn’t. ‘How long you got to play with?’
She told him, expecting him to laugh.
He didn’t. ‘Walk away, lass,’ he said. ‘Just take a holiday. There’s no shame in that.’
44
Avoiding the Second Death
HER HAIR FELL not much more than shoulder-length but was bushed out, maybe a little frizzy; her nose was hooked, her mouth small but full-lipped. The sleeveless white blouse she wore was knotted under her breasts. She had her hands clasped behind her head, her face upturned. Smiling at the sun – eating the world.
Rebekah.
The black and white photograph was pinned to the wall above a small inglenook in the back room. Eating the world, and then she choked. It broke your heart.
‘That’s not one of Lake’s?’ Merrily asked Al.
‘Mother of God, no, it’s a blow-up of a picture she sent to Tit Bits or Reveille – you remember those old glamour magazines? Looking for a career as a pin-up or a model. It was found after she disappeared. The family had copies made to show around, to see if anyone had seen her. They had to conduct their own search, in the end.’
‘That’s ridiculous.’
‘Ah, in those days, as Sally may have said to you, people from ethnic minorities were not considered proper people.’ His eyes were quiet this morning. ‘Even the beautiful ones.’
The back room of the Hop Museum was not open to the public because it also served as a workshop. It ran the length of the main building, and the two shorter walls were lined with racks of hand tools, probably antiques in themselves. There were a pair of elderly wood-lathes and a bench with a Bunsen burner attached to a liquid-gas bottle. Guitar parts – necks, pine tops, bridges – hung from walls and beams. There was a rich composite aroma of glue and resin and wood.
And hops, of course. The scent of hops was unavoidable in this place.
In a white waistcoat and a spotted silk scarf which, Merrily recalled from childhood, was called a diklo, Al had welcomed her with a small bow and a kiss on the hand. Now he was moving around the workshop, picking up guitar fragments and gently putting them down. A sign down by the road had said: MUSEUM CLOSED ALL DAY.
They were still waiting for Simon St John.
‘What do you want me to do?’ Merrily asked Al. ‘I’m afraid I don’t really have as much time as I’d have liked.’ She’d told him as much as she needed to of what had happened after she and Lol had left Knight’s Frome last night. ‘And I’ll need to be there, obviously, when the police come to talk to Jane.’ Al was nodding, but she could tell he was somewhere else.
Jane might sleep for hours yet, Eirion had kept insisting. You go. I can tell this is important. And when she comes down we’ve got a lot to talk about, haven’t we?
At least it wasn’t far; she could be back in just over half an hour, if necessary. If they could hold off the police until this afternoon, that would help. She’d already called Mumford, asked if this was possible. Mumford had said, We’ve found a knife, by the way.
Al was still nodding his goblin chin. ‘By one o’clock, it should be over. By one, we’ll have done all we can do.’
‘But are we trying for the same thing?’
‘To bring her into the light,’ Al said.
‘But is it the same light?’
‘Light is light, drukerimaskri. You know that.’
‘I suppose.’ She didn’t even know if he was a Christian. ‘Where’s Sally?’
‘Gone for a walk. Coming to terms.’
‘How happy is she – about what you’re proposing?’
‘Ah…’ He picked up an unstained guitar neck, only half fretted, held it up to one eye and looked along it. ‘Well, she thinks we should have acted on this when we first suspected something was arising. I tried. I talked to Stock, way back. Told him to sell the place to Lake, take his wife away from here.’
‘Did you?’
‘Ah, but Stock’s patting me on the shoulder, patronizing, like I’m this colourful old rural character. Perhaps I should’ve had more patience with Stock, told him I was Boswell the guitar-maker, but I didn’t want him to know. Consequently, perhaps, I don’t suppose he believed a word I was telling him.’
‘He must have believed something in the end. He went to Simon
St John. And then he came to me.’
‘Poor Simon, he doesn’t want to do this, even now. He’s afraid for himself, and for his wife. He’s afraid of what he might bring down on his wife.’
Merrily didn’t quite understand, but it was clear that nobody seemed to be entirely happy about this, perhaps not even Al himself.
‘Then why today?’ she asked him. ‘Why the hurry?’
‘It’s not a hurry for me, drukerimaskri.’ He put down the guitar neck. ‘I’ve had years to prepare.’
‘Why you?’
‘Because I’m the only Romany left. And because it’s always been my responsibility.’
‘Why?’
Al peered around the workshop, as if to record every detail in his mind. As if to hold a memory of it.
‘I think Simon’s here,’ he said.
The address Frannie Bliss had given him proved to be a three-storey Victorian terrace on the main road out of Leominster. Lol parked the Astra half on the pavement, from where he could see the numbers on the front doors.
The man he was looking for lived in the ground-floor flat at the far end of the terrace, but he owned the whole building, Bliss had emphasized, as if this explained something.
Lol sat there for ten minutes, the car slowly turning into a roasting tin around him. He thought about Simon St John, who had once said, This is the country, Lol. In the country, in certain situations, everybody lies. Had Simon himself really been telling the truth this time? Had he genuinely been too scared to attempt to exorcize Stock’s kiln? In which case, why hadn’t he referred it directly to Merrily instead of trying to claim Stock was making it up? Lol concluded that in an irrational situation people acted irrationally. How would Merrily react? Would she help Simon now, despite everything?
Stupid question.
No time for stupid questions.
As Lol got out of the car, the front door at the end of the terrace opened and a man in a light blue suit came out.
Lol stayed close to the Astra. The man didn’t look behind him, or towards Lol, as he walked out of the entrance. Could this actually be the right guy – wide shoulders, stiff white hair? Stop him now? Accost him before he got into his car?
But the man didn’t go to a car. He walked briskly along the pavement. When a woman passed him, he said warmly, ‘How are you, my dear?’ Glanced up into the sky. ‘Make the most of it, it’s due to break today, I hear.’ Rich, rolling local accent.
Lol followed him to where the road widened and you could see a junction with fields beyond. But before that there was a big Safeway supermarket, a commercial palace with a tower, set well back behind its car park. The man almost skipped down the steps towards the supermarket. Lol waited until he’d reached the bottom and was strolling across the car park towards the entrance, before following.
He watched the white-haired man go through the automatic door. Hesitated. Was he supposed to challenge this guy across the fruit counter, maybe block his trolley in one of the aisles?
Lol went through the door, through the porch, past Postman Pat and his black and white cat in their van, and on into the store. He looked from side to side: a dozen or so customers, none of them a man in a blue suit – maybe he’d gone to the Gents’. Lol moved further into the store, uncertain. He felt conspicuous, so he picked up a shopping basket from a stack. He felt hollow. He was hollow. He couldn’t do this.
The voice was very close to his left ear.
‘Looking for me, brother?’
A clock made out of a breadboard with a six-pointed star on it put the time at ten-fifteen a.m.
‘Why noon?’ Merrily asked bluntly.
Simon St John exchanged a glance with Al.
Al was sitting straight-backed on his stool, determinedly defiant, with his hands in the side pockets of his waistcoat. Simon St John, however, looked as wrecked as his jeans.
‘When we travelled,’ Al said, ‘we camped at night, but we always stopped the wagons at noon: the time of no shadows. Do you understand? Noon is the dead moment in time. When the day belongs to the dead – all the energy of the day sucked in. Sometimes, for a fraction of an instant, you can almost see it, like a photograph turned negative. Everything is still, everything – the road, the fields, the sky – belonging to the dead.’
‘He means that noon is the time of the mulo,’ Simon said. ‘The only time you’ll see one by daylight.’
‘No.’ Al tossed a guitar bridge from one hand to the other. ‘In most cases, you won’t see it at all.’
Merrily shrank from the melodrama. The time of no shadows. And yet…
‘You do know, don’t you, that we did the Deliverance in the kiln around midday? Stock wanted me to do it at night. I said, let’s do it now, in the full light of a summer morning. Let’s not make it sinister. You did know that?’
‘And was this when the sulphur came to you?’
‘At midday, yes. Or very close.’
Al glanced at the photograph. ‘She could have had you. You were lucky.’
‘Or protected.’
‘And were you protected in the hop-yard last night?’
Merrily felt herself blush. ‘It happened too quickly.’
‘Lucky,’ Al said.
‘What is she?’ Merrily asked. ‘I need to know. You use these terms – muli. Very sinister. But what are we really talking about?’
Simon St John came over to sit down. He had a glass of water. All three of them were drinking water. No alcohol, no caffeine, not today.
‘Not quite a ghost,’ Simon said. ‘Not possession either, in the classic sense. You could say it’s a question of borrowing the aura.’
‘Very much a Romany thing,’ Al pointed out. ‘Live lightly and borrow.’
‘But the mulo doesn’t necessarily give back,’ Simon said. He kept rubbing his black-shirted arms as though they were cold.
‘This is true,’ Al accepted.
Simon said, ‘When Shakespeare talked about shuffling off the mortal coil, he was probably close to it. Death appears to be a staggered process – when the body dies, the spirit exists for a while in the aura, the astral body, the corporeal energy field. Its normal procedure, at this stage, is to look for the exit sign and get the hell out.’
‘But if the cycle’s incomplete,’ Al said, ‘if there’s a need for justice, for balance, for satisfaction…’
Merrily thought about it. ‘This is about what’s sometimes called the Second Death isn’t it?’
‘This is about avoiding the Second Death.’ Simon leaned forward. ‘I don’t think it’s common, not in our society. I don’t imagine it’s a common occurrence in the Romany culture either. I think it’s something they’ve tended to blow up out of proportion over the centuries – I bloody hope it is.’
‘It’s an unpleasant state to be in,’ Al said, ‘because the mulo is said to require life-energy to maintain its existence. Hence the term “living dead”. There are tales of a mulo or muli sucking the blood of the living, but’ – he waved a long hand dismissively – ‘it’s all energy. Sexual, mostly. The victim may be the former life-partner – you get tales of people having sex with their dead husbands or wives – or the person held responsible for the sudden death of the subject before their time.’
‘In the stories, they talk of a solid physical presence,’ Simon said. ‘But we prefer dreams, or sexual fantasies.’
‘You’re selling it as psychology?’ Merrily asked, doubtful.
‘It’s all psychology,’ Simon said. ‘That doesn’t make it any less real. It doesn’t make it any less frightening.’ His face was gaunt; it was one of those soft, pale faces which could alternate in seconds between looking youthful and prematurely aged. ‘The thought of Rebekah – or what she may have become – leaves me cold with—I’m sorry.’
Al stood up and walked over to the photograph. ‘It seems to me that our task is to separate the spirit of Rebekah from what’s formed around it. The evil that grows like fungus around hatred and rage. You follow, dru
kerimaskri?’
‘And lead it to God. To the light.’
‘And the evil,’ Simon said sourly. ‘Where does that go?’
‘My responsibility.’ Al walked to the door. ‘You two probably have Christian things to work out. I’m going to the place. I’m going to talk to my father. Come when you’re ready, you won’t disturb me.’
‘Al…?’ Merrily touched his sleeve.
‘It’ll work out, drukerimaskri.’ He looked again at the picture of the young woman amateurishly pouting at the sun. ‘She’s ripe. She’s swollen. We can’t delay.’
He walked out without looking back.
Councillor Howe said, ‘Small piece of advice, brother Robinson, in case you’re ever called upon to tail anybody again. Nobody comes shopping at a supermarket and parks half a mile away. Just a small point.’
‘Thanks.’ Lol took the two cups of tea off the tray, along with Charlie Howe’s doughnut. This time in the morning, fewer than a quarter of the tables in the supermarket coffee shop were taken. They were sitting at a window table, just up from the creche.
‘I take it this en’t council business, then.’ Charlie Howe’s brown, leathery face was not remotely wary. He bit into his doughnut. Dark, liquid jam spurted. Charlie licked his fingers. ‘And you’re not a newspaperman after my memoirs?’
‘Newspaper, no,’ Lol said. ‘Memoirs, probably.’
‘Cost you, boy.’
‘Bought you a doughnut.’
Charlie smiled. ‘That gets you as far as 1960. Nothing much happened that year, I was still a beat copper.’
‘How about sixty-three?’
‘Young DC, then. Still hadn’t done my first murder. What did you say you did for a living?’
‘Write songs.’
His eyes were deep-sunk in his craggy forehead, like rock-pools. ‘So this’d be ‘The Ballad of Charlie Howe’, then?’
Lol fought the urge to look away, out of the window. ‘How about “The Ballad of Rebekah Smith”?’
Charlie raised an eyebrow. ‘Don’t reckon that’s a song would mean an awful lot to me.’
‘Maybe you’d only be in the last verse,’ Lol said.
