The Cure of Souls

by Phil Rickman

  ‘This is the kiln murder, yes? And that’s what put you on to Lake.’ He scratched his head. ‘Fact is, I hadn’t even realized this was the same bloody kiln.’

  ‘Well, I’m going to be dead honest with you—’

  ‘Must you, Robinson? Half a lifetime in the police force and a good few years mixing day-to-day with councillors, I en’t comfortable with honesty.’

  ‘Well,’ Lol shrugged, ‘the truth is I haven’t a hope in hell of proving the police had good reason to suspect Lake of killing Rebekah Smith and then pulled back because Lake was who he was. I’ve got even less chance of proving that somebody in the police confiscated whatever the Smith boys nicked the night of Stewart’s murder. All I know is that Mumford made the arrest, and Mumford and you were always close, despite the disparity in rank.’

  ‘Absolutely correct, my friend. Salt of the earth, Andy. Solid as a bloody rock.’

  ‘And he presumably holds you in similar esteem – and he wouldn’t like to see your reputation impugned by something that happened forty years ago when you were a youngster and perhaps had to choose between turning a blind eye to something and seeing a promising career go down the tubes. And anyway, he’s coming up to retirement, so he doesn’t have much to lose. See, I can’t prove anything. But I can think of one or two papers – even TV programmes…’

  Charlie came down from the window sill. ‘We’re not in a café now, Brother. I could knock your bloody head off.’

  ‘Sure. I bet you know all the ways of working suspects over in the cells without leaving a mark. But you’ve got to remember, when I get up, I’ll be back on the case. You can take a lot of bruises and broken bones and ruptured spleens, for love.’

  Charlie Howe’s expression didn’t change. ‘And what’s Anne gonner do, exactly?’

  Lol told him about the proposed statement on exorcism and responsibility, as outlined by Frannie Bliss.

  Charlie sniffed. ‘Not a chance. You been led up the garden path, brother. No chief constable – certainly not this one – would put his name to something that could get him in bother with the Church. They don’t need that kind of conflict. En’t like you get one of these every day or even every year, is it? The Chief’ll tell Anne if she wants to say that stuff, she can get out there and say it herself.’

  ‘You think she wouldn’t?’

  Charlie finally went over and collapsed into his recliner. ‘You want the truth, I think she would. The truth – bloody hell, you got me going, now. Have a drink?’

  ‘No, thanks. I was up all night. I’m already running on reserve.’

  ‘You want more truth? I don’t think it’d do Anne any more good, long-term, than it would for Merrily. A detective with a big mouth has a limited career span. In the Service, anyway. Might get a job on there.’ He pointed the toe of his shoe at the TV screen. ‘And I thought she’d got over all that. All right.’ He sat up. ‘I’ll talk to her.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Don’t think this is a victory for you, Brother. I en’t finished with you, yet. And I’m not saying she’ll take any notice. But I’ll talk to her.’

  Lol said, ‘Any chance you could make it a priority thing?’

  ‘I’ll see if she’s free tonight.’ Charlie stood up, went over to the phone. ‘I en’t finished with you, though, I surely bloody en’t.’ He didn’t need to look up the number. ‘DCI,’ he said into the phone. ‘Aye, this is her ol’ man, if you don’t know the voice.’ He waited, then he said, ‘Colin, how you doing, boy? Where is she? Really? What time would that be, then? Aye, I know that, boy, but where can I find her now?’ He blew some air down his nose. ‘All right. Thank you, boy.’

  ‘Not there?’

  ‘Gone off tying up the ends of the Stock case,’ Charlie said. ‘As you might expect.’

  ‘The ends?’

  ‘And there’ll be at least one TV crew up there filming, for the news. She’s agreed to do interviews early this afternoon, on site.’

  ‘She’ll use that as the opportunity, won’t she?’

  ‘She might,’ Charlie conceded. ‘You going back there?’

  Lol nodded.

  ‘Might follow you,’ Charlie said.

  She’d wondered, half-hopefully, if by day – especially on a day like this – it might look innocuous, even friendly. She’d half expected to feel, on arriving here, faintly stupid.

  Never before having been asked to exorcize a field.

  So it came as a shock, the deadness of it: the yellowness of the grass on what was supposed to be deep loam, the black alleys of poles with their crosspieces looking like some battlefield arrangement from the First World War, so that you expected to encounter occasional corpses leaning against the poles, tatters of uniforms and flesh hanging from grey bones.

  But there was only Al.

  She didn’t see him at first. He was sitting immobile between two distant poles, a white thing like a chalk megalith.

  ‘Stay here,’ Simon said. ‘He’ll be in some kind of trance. Not that we’d disturb him – a Romany shaman could go into trance between checkouts at Tesco. At their spiritual-healing sessions, it’s pandemonium, everybody talking and laughing, drums, violins – it’s the way they are. I just suspect – call me an old reactionary – that we shouldn’t necessarily become involved with his current ambience.’

  ‘Stay at this end, then?’

  ‘I think so.’

  Merrily looked up at the sky through an irregular network of wires. ‘How long to noon?’ She’d come out without her watch.

  Simon looked at his, then took it off. ‘Fifty-one minutes.’

  He laid the watch on the parched grass near the base of a pole. Stood there in his dog collar and his ruined jeans, with his fair hair looking almost white and as dead as the grass, and his hands on his hips.

  ‘Over to you,’ he said. ‘Drukerimaskri.’

  46

  Every Evil Haunting and Phantasm

  CHARLIE HOWE CLEARLY knew the TV cameraman – grey-haired bloke crouching near the sign saying knight’s frome, getting the church into shot. The old Jaguar pulled in next to him and Charlie leaned out of the window, bawling out, ‘Jim!’

  Lol brought the Astra up behind the Jag, as the cameraman turned in irritation, then saw who it was and grinned, lowering his camera. ‘Knew they’d never be able to manage without you, Charlie. Come to take over the inquiry, is it?’

  Charlie poked a finger out of the window. ‘Now don’t you go saying that to Anne, boy.’

  Jim said he wasn’t that brave, and they laughed, and then Charlie said, ‘Talking of whom, you seen that girl at all?’

  Lol spotted a slender woman walking through the churchyard, about two hundred yards away. He thought it was Sally Boswell, with someone else, a child it looked like from where he was.

  He got out of the car as the cameraman said, ‘Nobody here yet, Charlie, only me, shooting wallpaper till the reporter shows. What you doing with yourself now?’

  ‘Creating the new Hereford, most of the time,’ Charlie told him. ‘So Anne’s due when?’

  ‘Two o’clock, outside the pub. That’s what I was told.’

  Lol ran past them, towards the churchyard.

  Sally wore a faded yellow dress and a straw sunhat, and it wasn’t a child with her but Isabel St John in her wheelchair. Isabel looked defiant. Her crimson top began just above her nipples.

  ‘Laurence.’ Sally pulled off her hat; her misty hair was pushed back over her ears and her skin was pale as moth wings. She tucked the hat under an arm, drew a tissue from her sleeve and blew her nose. ‘Hay fever. Isn’t it ridiculous? Haven’t suffered in years.’

  Lol thought she’d been crying.

  Isabel glanced back, almost disparagingly, at the church. ‘Been trying to do our bit, isn’t it?’

  ‘Supportive prayer,’ Sally said. ‘Though I’m afraid I don’t particularly feel any closer to the Deity in there.’

  Isabel raised her eyes. ‘Should’ve said. Out here’s a
ll right.’ A Red Admiral butterfly landed on an arm of her wheelchair and stayed there, as though it had been sprayed with lacquer.

  ‘Where’s Al?’ Lol said. The air seemed hushed and heavy, not only around the church but over the whole valley. He wasn’t aware of any birds singing. He could see Charlie Howe walking towards them, but couldn’t hear his steps.

  ‘Al?’ said Sally. ‘Don’t you know?’

  ‘Al’s with Simon,’ Isabel said. ‘And your lady. Chasing the gorgeous, pouting Rebekah. Dredging her up from the slime.’ Her voice had gone harsh with distress. ‘Didn’t you know?’

  ‘Now? Today?’

  ‘For noon.’

  ‘They’re doing it now?’

  Sally put a hand on his arm. Her fingers felt like lace. ‘Don’t interfere, Laurence. It does have to be done, I’m afraid. Al and I quarrelled over it. I didn’t want…’ She half turned away. ‘He believes he has no choice. He believes he’s responsible for her. That’s all there is to it.’

  ‘What about Merrily? Who’s she res—’

  ‘You want to concentrate more on your music, Lol,’ Isabel said. ‘Form a new band. Employ Simon, get him out of this crappy job.’ The butterfly still hadn’t moved. Isabel looked as if she wanted to swat it. ‘Nobody needs this in their lives. We can deal with it, if we have to, when we’re dead.’

  ‘Where are they?’ Lol said.

  ‘Leave it,’ Sally told him. ‘Whatever has to happen will happen.’

  ‘While we get to wait on the shore.’ Isabel put on a pair of very dark sunglasses. ‘Keep the bloody home fires burning.’

  The butterfly finally took off, fluttered to a nearby grave. Lol said, ‘Why do they need Merrily? Why couldn’t they have done this in the first place? I can’t believe Simon was scared.’

  ‘What do you know, Lol?’ Isabel said with venom. ‘What do you know of what he’s been through over the years? You think it isn’t a terrible bloody burden for a priest to be psychic?’

  ‘I’m sure it is. But if he thinks Merrily can come in and shoulder it—’

  ‘Nobody can shoulder it. He has to face it on his own.’

  ‘Then why do they need Merrily? Is it because Rebekah will only come to a woman?’

  ‘Stop it,’ Sally said. ‘Both of them are Christians. Neither of them is part of the tradition. If anything happens to anyone…’ She opened her bag, took out a parchment-coloured, egg-shaped label and handed it to Lol. ‘I found this when I came back.’

  He recognized it at once. It was what you saw when you peered down the soundhole of a well-loved guitar, with the sacred name ‘Boswell’ printed quite small.

  Sally said, ‘It’s the price you pay. For preserving the balance. What you borrow must be repaid, if not in itself then… in kind. Sometimes with interest.’

  Below the name was an inner oval in which the serial number of each instrument would be stamped. In this space was hand-printed:

  My love

  Don’t burn

  the vardo

  The hop-frames were constructed from now-faded creosoted poles, ten to fifteen feet high and leaning inwards. The cross-pieces of some were fixed below the top, forming two actual crosses, joined. Merrily took this as significant, and she and Simon each stood under a cross, close to the entrance of the alley.

  Al Boswell sat at the far end, seventy or eighty yards away. His head was bowed.

  Dead bines hung limp from several frames.

  With the airline bag at her feet, Merrily laid the Lord’s Prayer on the still, already humid air.

  When she’d finished, there was a strange silence in the yard that seemed close to absolute. No birds was what it meant, she decided – there seemed to be nothing here for them to feed on. The hop-yard and adjacent fields were almost in a bowl of earth, the landscape curving up to wooded hills, only the highest ridge of the Malverns visible.

  And only one building, the one with the witch’s-hat tower. Should I say it came out of the kiln on the smoke of Rebekah’s cremation? Was it scattered with her ashes?

  What came out? What was at the core of this? As Simon had pointed out, there was no agreed ritual for this situation.

  Merrily glanced up the alley towards Al Boswell. His hands were raised now, in supplication, and he seemed to be chanting, though she couldn’t hear anything – was Al’s consciousness down there in the Lower World, home of the ancestors and the dead, bargaining with his father, the chovihano, for the soul of Rebekah? What was he offering? What did he expect to pay? She felt scared for him because he came from a culture which was, in essence, unbending.

  She also felt an agitation and a tension emanating like cold steam from Simon St John. She banished it, closed her eyes and tried to concentrate on her breathing without changing its rhythm.

  In her hands she held a slim prayer book. Into her mind came the image of Rebekah in her sleeveless white blouse. No earrings – the girl wouldn’t have wanted to look like a gypsy for the picture editor at Tit Bits. Poor kid. Poor Rebekah: brazen hussy of 1963, blinded by her own sexuality. As if she’d like to seize the whole world in her teeth.

  Eating the world… and suddenly choking. Merrily sensed how dense and dark the flesh-smelling smoke from the kiln would have been, made noxious by all the psychic bacteria that fed on the detritus of violent death. Remnants here, too, of Conrad Lake, his greed, his ultimately murderous cruelty.

  This was about separating Rebekah’s soul from all of that and guiding it to the light.

  Merrily opened her eyes, consulted the book and said quietly, ‘Remember not, Lord, our offences, nor the offences of our forefathers, and do not condemn us for our sins… Lord have mercy.’

  ‘Lord have mercy,’ Simon echoed from across the alley.

  ‘Christ have mercy.’

  ‘Christ have mercy.’

  She visualized Rebekah Smith in the kiln, doubled up, the beautiful features blotched and reddened and distended by coughing and retching and wheezing.

  ‘Heavenly father.’

  ‘Have mercy on her!’

  … While the sulphur rolls burned blue and the few remaining hop-cones yellowed on their loft.

  ‘Jesus, redeemer of the world…’

  ‘Have mercy on her.’

  Rebekah screaming inside as the fumes took her.

  I watched her heaving and shivering and struggling for breath…

  Merrily broke off from the litany. The air felt dense and weighted. She suddenly felt desperately tired, and she was scared to close her eyes again in case she fell asleep on her feet.

  ‘Oh Christ,’ Simon murmured.

  She looked across at him. He was aglow with sweat. He said, ‘You’ve brought someone with you, haven’t you?’ He had his eyes closed now, his fists clenched. ‘You’re carrying the weight of someone.’

  Merrily began to pant.

  ‘Bleeding,’ Simon said. ‘She’s bleeding.’

  Merrily whispered, ‘Jesus, redeemer of the world, have mercy on her.’

  Her. Rebekah, in her white blouse.

  Her. Layla Riddock in her black kimono.

  ‘Have mercy on them,’ Simon cried out.

  Sweat dripped down Merrily’s cheeks.

  ‘Holy Spirit, comforter…’

  ‘Have mercy on them.’

  ‘Holy Trinity, one God…’

  ‘Have mercy on them.’

  ‘From all evil…’

  ‘Deliver her…’

  It all came out in a rush now, and they were working together, a unit. ‘From anger, hatred and malice… From all the deceits of the world, the flesh and the devil… Good Lord, deliver them.’

  The cotton alb was fused to Merrily’s skin. If she had an aura, it felt like liquid, like oil. The air was very close. There seemed to be a different atmosphere here between the poles, a separate density of air. Between the wires, the sun was like a hole in the sky.

  ‘Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world.’

  ‘Have mercy on her,’
Simon said.

  ‘Yes,’ Merrily said.

  She felt that Rebekah was very near, but resistant to the idea of being guided towards the Second Death. It came to her suddenly that Layla had somehow been sent as an intermediary. Allan Henry: Layla, love, excuse me, but these ladies would like to know if you have much contact with the dead.

  She prayed for guidance, but she couldn’t see the blue or the gold, and her pectoral cross felt as heavy as an anvil.

  The cross? Was the cross preventing—?

  She touched it. Please, God, what shall I do? The cross felt cold. She longed to give herself away, as she had in church on the night of the coin, in true and total submission, so that her life-energy, her living spirit, might be used as a vessel of transformation for the tortured essence of Rebekah Smith: a sacrifice.

  She turned to Simon, but he seemed a long way away. She closed her eyes, was aware of an intense pressure in her chest, as though she was about to have a heart attack.

  She let the prayer book fall and used both hands to slip the chain and the cross up and over her head.

  Simon had both arms around the pole with the wooden cross at the top, hugging it, like a sailor who’d roped himself to the mast in a storm. His body seemed to be in spasm. She was aware of a foetid fog between them.

  She heard a cry from the end of the alley—

  ‘Oh, Mother of God!’

  —which had become like a tunnel now, a tunnel through the middle of the day, and then there was a wrenching sensation from above, as though the crosspiece linking her pole with Simon’s pole was under sudden, severe stress.

  Don’t look.

  But, of course, she had to.

  Her body was held inert by damp dread, but her eyes followed the leaden, loaded creaking to the cross pole. From it, hanging like a lagged cistern between her and Simon St John, the corpse of Gerard Stock was turning slowly, tongue protruding, white and furry, between the rosebud, spittled lips.