by Phil Rickman
‘Frannie…’ Merrily looked over a traffic queue to the new magistrates’ court that the planners had allowed to eat up a useful car park. ‘Be careful, OK?’
Merrily went home by taxi. She hung her coat over the post at the foot of the stairs and fed the cat. Alone in the vicarage, she felt edgy and unclean, and also guilty at being grateful to Roddy Lodge’s flash young lawyer for sparing her an intimate session with a man who kept eroticized pictures of dead women on his bedroom walls.
It was nearly nine p.m. To get this out of the way, she rang the Reverend Jerome Banks, Rural Dean for Ross-on-Wye. She remembered him as a wiry man with an abrupt manner, an ex-Army officer who’d once served alongside James Bull-Davies at Brecon. If Roddy Lodge had been mentally unstable, he ought to have spotted the signs. She got his answering machine and left her name, would try again tomorrow.
She had a shower, washed her hair, thinking of Jane at Knight’s Frome with Lol, wishing she was there. After putting on a clean alb, she still felt uncomfortable, a little clammy. She was pulling her black woollen shawl around her shoulders, ready to walk over to the church for some further cleansing, when the phone rang.
It was the Reverend Jerome Banks. ‘Mad?’ he said. ‘Oh yes. Absolutely barking, I’d say.’
14
Recognizing Madness
HAD SOMEONE FOLLOWED her in?
If it was a footstep, it was a light one. It might be a cat. Sometimes cats came into the church, and once there’d been a badger. But badgers weren’t stealthy; they clattered and rummaged.
Merrily was sitting in the old choirmaster’s oaken chair with her hands on her knees, a single small candle lit on the altar fifteen feet away, a draught from somewhere bending the flame, making shadows swirl and dip and rise to the night-dulled stained-glass window at the top of the chancel.
Ledwardine Church was locked soon after dark, nowadays, unless a service or a meeting was scheduled. She’d let herself in through the side entrance, which at least had a key you didn’t need both hands to turn. Against all advice, she hadn’t locked the door behind her. It was fundamentally important to feel she had protection in here, inside this great medieval night-dormant engine, or else what was the point?
Probably hadn’t been a footstep at all. After a day like this, the world seemed riddled with tunnels of obsession. For a cold moment, Merrily held before her an image of the frozen smiles of all the dead women on Roddy Lodge’s bedroom walls as they writhed in other women’s bodies, and then she let it fade, whispering the Lord’s Prayer. Apart from having to give evidence at the inquest on Lynsey Davies, her role in this particular police investigation was probably over.
And yet – shifting restlessly in the choirmaster’s chair – how could it be over when she was still attached via Gomer, who would never back off until Lodge had been convicted for Nev? Plus, here was Frannie Bliss about to exploit Gomer in the interests of keeping the case in his pocket: bad, selfish policing, and he knew it. Maverick cops were for the movies, and Frannie was on a narrowing tightrope. Meanwhile, Roddy Lodge…
‘Barking, of course,’ the Reverend Jerome Banks had said at once. ‘A complete fantasist. Wanted to tell me about the ghosts he’d been seeing all over the place. Well, isn’t as if you and I haven’t met lots of people like this, all the clergy do… They seek us out, expecting tea and cakes and a sympathetic ear that also happens to be entirely uncritical. Hardly dangerous, in the normal… I mean, not even to themselves, not in the normal course of things. Well, hardly going to spew out all this to the detective chappie, was I? What was I supposed to say? Boy didn’t seem deranged in a psychotic sense. I had absolutely no reason at all to suspect he might ever do what he’s done – well, of course I hadn’t.’
‘So you just offered him a sympathetic ear.’
‘No, I said that was what these people expected. Personally, I’ve never been one to play the jolly old dim-witted vicar. That’s what’s got the Church into its present enfeebled condition, if you ask me. Public starts to think we’re all half-baked. And this chap was getting on my nerves, to be quite honest. Bumptious? Full of himself? Never seen the like. I wasn’t entirely sure, to tell you the truth, if he wasn’t taking the piss.’
‘You said he came specifically to tell you about the ghosts he said he was seeing?’
‘Look…’ Jerome Banks had made an exasperated rumbling noise. ‘He was asking me how his property could possibly be haunted. How this could happen when it wasn’t an old house? Just built it himself – so how could it be haunted? I said had he put the pipes in properly? Had he had the wiring checked by experts?’
‘He was hearing strange noises, you mean? Lights were going on and off, that kind of—?’
‘I don’t know. That’s what usually happens, isn’t it? Look, Mrs Watkins, I’m not awfully ashamed to admit I’ve never really been into that kind of malarkey. Don’t know how you people manage to keep a straight face half the time. And anyway, this was rather before your time, so the only alternative would’ve been to refer him to your predecessor, old Dobbs – who was completely bloody barking, in my view… well, in everybody’s view, really. So I was rather relieved when Lodge reared up aghast, said no, he didn’t want any of that, thank you very much.’
‘Any of what?’
‘You know… prayers for the Unquiet Dead.’
‘Then why did he come to see you? His family was Baptist, anyway, surely?’
‘No idea at all. Never met the chap before.’
‘So did he say what kind of… manifestation… he’d been experiencing?’
‘Oh, it was probably all washing over me by then. I didn’t take detailed notes. You know as well as I do that we could spend all our time listening to all kinds of complete nonsense, but when you’ve got half a dozen parishes to organize you have to adjust your patience-level accordingly.’
‘When exactly was this?’
‘Probably in my diary somewhere but, off the cuff, two years ago? Three?’
She hadn’t pushed him any further, but she guessed there was quite a lot he wasn’t saying.
Not her business, anyway. Merrily let her head roll, shoulder to shoulder, with tiny cracklings like the beginnings of fire in kindling. Her woollen shawl was a distraction; she let it slip over the back of the chair and began to relax her body, starting with her toes – tightening muscles, letting go. Warmth would come.
For a while, she’d resisted Eastern-influenced meditation – the awakening of the chakras – as vaguely unChristian and also very Jane. But the demands of Deliverance, especially, had brought out a need for experience on a deeper level, a need to find moments of knowing. There were still too many times when she was appalled at her own weakness and ignorance, the frailty of her faith – a woman of straw. OK, humility was crucial, but so was a small, hot core of certainty. Some kind of retreat might have helped restore her inner balance, but there’d never been time for that – hadn’t even been time for a holiday. This job was smothering her; it was everywhere, like fog.
Lose thoughts. Concentrate on the breathing. It had taken her some time to realize that this was not about breathing consciously but becoming conscious of your breathing, simple things like that.
Gradually, the fabric of the church faded: the stonework, the stained glass, the rood-screen with its carved apples, the pulpit where she tried to preach while hating the word ‘preach’ with all its connotations, the entrance to the Bull Chapel with its eerily sleepless effigy. After a time, the church ceased to be its furniture, its artefacts. Now came the space, the atmosphere, the charged air – this was the church.
Her spine straightened from what she hadn’t realized had been a slump; there was a warmth in her chest, her breathing was deepening. There was a moment when the warmth aroused an underlying pleasure that was close to sexual; she had a glimpse of Lol and let it go at once… you just let it go, without guilt or self-recrimination. You let the breath become the Spirit and the Spirit filled you, pouring down to
the stomach, with that strange, active relaxation of the solar plexus – separation, breath of God… God breathes me – and, at some stage, entered prayer.
Thack.
Merrily’s eyelids sprang back. The building seemed to shudder, as though the pews, the pulpit, the stone tombs had been brutally hurled back into place.
She knew at once what it was, knew every little noise this church made after hours.
The latch. When you were used to it, you could let the iron latch on the side door slip silently back into place. When you weren’t, the latch came down hard: thack.
Someone had been in here with her for a while, and then gone out.
Or wanted her to think they’d gone out.
The draught had died; the candle flame was placid now, making a nest of light on the altar. Merrily rose quietly, stood under the rood-screen and listened intently for more than a minute, staring down the central aisle.
Rat eyes in the dark? Anyway, she refused to be intimidated. If they’d gone, they’d gone. If they hadn’t, she was safer up here, close to the altar. She hadn’t finished, anyway. She knelt in the centre of the chancel and prayed for Gomer. And for Roddy Lodge. And for Frannie Bliss, who confused police work with poker, his cards up against his shirt-front, always raising the stakes.
She waited for two or three minutes before coming to her feet, bowing her head, gathering her shawl from the back of the choirmaster’s chair and going to the altar to snuff out the candle.
She listened again. There was nothing to be heard inside, not even the skittering of mice. Only the wind from outside. The row of high, plain, diamond-paned windows was opaque – no moon to light her way down the aisle. She always thought she could find her way blindfold around this church, but twice she collided with the ends of pews. Nerves.
At the bottom of the aisle, Merrily walked into something that should not have been there and fell hard onto the stone flags.
The original plan had been to return to the studio, to carry on working until midnight. But after Jane and Eirion had left, Moira had said she was tired, so Prof had suggested they wind up.
Soon after this, Gomer had phoned, the familiar old buzz under his voice.
How you fixed for ten o’clock, boy?’
‘Tomorrow?’ The mobile had halted Lol at the door, Maglite in hand, about to guide Moira back along the track to the granary. He’d been thinking maybe he’d have a week or so – at least until after Nev’s funeral – to get himself a little fitter before Gomer summoned him to make a fool of himself laying field drainage under the sardonic gaze of some Radnor Valley sheep farmer.
‘Police, it is, see. Can’t say too much on the phone, but anything that’ll help bury that bastard, I’ll do it, they knows that.’
‘We’re working for the police?’
‘Can’t say too much. Ten o’clock, boy?’
‘Early night for you, too, then,’ Moira said when he folded up the phone. ‘Hand me the torch, Laurence, I can see m’self back.’
‘You’ll need someone to run for help if you get attacked,’ Lol said.
Moira rolled her eyes, taking down her black cloak from one of the hooks inside the stable door. The cloak was well worn, he noticed, and its hem was frayed. She walked outside and waited for him. The night was dry now and the wind seemed to have pulled back into the west, leaving a thin breeze.
They followed the pool of torchlight along the track, between two old oaks, avoiding the puddles.
Moira said, ‘Jane’s mother, your… friend – how’d she come to be doing that job?’
‘You don’t believe in a calling?’
‘No, becoming a priest, I can understand that part. In other circumstances I might’ve gone that way, too, who can say? I was meaning the exorcism side of it. I don’t know how many women priests would be doing that job, but I’d guess not many.’
‘No. How it happened was, a year or two ago she was faced with something she couldn’t explain, a… well, a haunting. And the Church wasn’t helpful, and she made some comments at a particular conference about the lack of any kind of real advice for the clergy on the paranormal. And there was a guy there who was about to become the new bishop of Hereford, and he had this old-style exorcist he wanted to get rid of.’
‘He tossed her in there cold?’
‘There was a training course.’
‘Oh right, a training course. So that’s all right, then.’
He looked at Moira, her cloak billowing a little as if it was responding to her annoyance.
She said, ‘Were there no’ some… aspects of herself she needed to resolve, perhaps? Just that I’ve talked to a couple of exorcists over the years, and they both got into this particular ministry to try and understand certain experiences or abilities they’d discovered they possessed – precognition… clairvoyance… mediumship.’
‘Common ground there for you?’
‘Oh, aye, it’s all been pretty much normal with me since I was a wee girl. Hereditary – from ma mother.’ She stopped, pulling the cloak around her. ‘I suppose what always bothered me most was not that I was sensing stuff that just seemed to go flying past other people, but why? Why me, y’ know? What was I supposed to do with it? Was there some wider purpose, or was it just there to give me a hard time – penance from another life or some shit like that? I just wondered if this was how it was with your friend – if she had personal stuff to come to terms with.’
Lol shook his head. ‘She wouldn’t claim to be psychic. She realizes she was brought in because she was a woman, youngish, personable… new image. That’s it, really. And she’s trying really hard to live up to it.’
‘Jesus.’ Moira ducked as more trees locked branches overhead. ‘These guys have some things to answer for, don’t they just? The administrators, the politicians, the power people with their meaningless degrees and their cheesy Tony Blair smiles, who think finding their sensitive side is learning how to change nappies and slice the fucking quiche. They never appoint people they believe can actually do anything, in case they do it too well. Just the ones they’re pretty sure they can control.’
‘He’s gone now, anyway.’ Lol stopped at an old footbridge over the narrow River Frome, which had seeped through the summer and now was racing with the rains of autumn. ‘You think that, as a normal person, with no obvious special… attributes, she maybe shouldn’t be doing what she’s doing?’
Moira leaned against the bridge’s damp wooden railing. ‘It bother you, what she does?’
‘Well, it’s not really my place—’
‘Oh, come on!’
‘It’s just that she was doing it before we—’
‘Does it scare you?’
‘Maybe not as much as it should.’ He pointed the Maglite vertically so that it made a white cone in the air. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Or maybe you’re more afraid of what’s in here’ – Moira pointed to the side of her head – ‘than what just might be out there.’ She levered herself away from the rail. ‘Well, more often than not, in my experience, Laurence, they are one and the same. Seems to me…’ She crossed the footbridge. ‘Ach, this is none of my—’
‘No, go on.’
A single light gleamed ahead of them. She’d taken his advice and left a light on in the granary, so that when they came out the other side of the trees they could see it in the middle distance.
‘It would be lovely,’ Moira said, ‘to think that the Holy Church confers protection. But I cannae help thinking that the awful mess that is modern Anglicanism is now becoming so far removed from the source that being an Anglican exorcist—’
‘Deliverance Consultant.’
‘Maybe it’s a wee bit like going into an unknown tropical jungle without your injections, carrying a road map of the Home Counties. Deliverance Consultant. Jesus, the weak-kneed bastards can’t even say what they mean.’
Lol stopped on the bridge. Beneath it, the swollen Frome foamed and spat; it wasn’t the river he thought he kne
w.
From the far bank, Moira said, ‘So I was lunching today with your not-invariably-amiable local clergyman, the Reverend Simon St John. A serious psychic, dogged all his life by premonitions, apparitions, all the bloody itions you can name. Still thinking of it as a kind of sickness, and the Church of England as his sanatorium. Guy who’ll run a mile from the unexplained.’
Lol joined her on the bank, uneasy. The torch beam showed the frayed hem of Moira’s cloak trailing in the mud; she didn’t seem concerned.
‘Simon and I were discussing your problem – the need to keep up appearances. In truth, we couldnae see you at the heart of village life – in your alien sweatshirt, handing round the vol- au-vents at the vicarage garden party, then stepping up on the podium with the Boswell guitar to perform a couple of angsty numbers for the parishioners. Simon said if it was him in Merrily’s shoes they could all go eat their lace curtains. But then, he’s a guy.’
The kind of guy, Lol reflected, who never worried about appearances and got away with it. Merrily tended not to get away with anything.
‘In the end, though, we couldnae come up with an easy answer, although Simon said it’d be a terrible shame if you didnae come through, the two of you. Not least, he said, because of what she’s doing… this lonely path, full of doubt and soul- searching and wondering whether you’re going clean out of your mind. She needs somebody around her who’s up to recognizing madness.’
‘Thanks.’
‘As for the wee girl…’
‘Jane?’
They came to the granary, the light from the window outlining the steps. ‘Some problem there, Laurence, my impression. Not a happy kid. I may be wrong; I don’t think so.’
Merrily limped into the vicarage, dragging the black sack after her – an ordinary Herefordshire Council medium-quality plastic bin liner. Under the security light over the church porch, she’d taken one look inside and then closed the top quickly, spinning the sack round and round.
