by Phil Rickman
Jane looked at Lol. Lol shrugged, unsure where this was going.
‘We’ve had our problems over that,’ Jane said. ‘Not for a while, though. I’m more open to what she does. And like, while she’s never going to dance naked in a stone circle, she’s come to accept that, living in a place like this you can’t be too… rigid in your beliefs. I suppose we meet in the middle, around the space occupied by Thomas Traherne, the poet. And vicar.’
Nora nodded. Lol was thinking there had to be more to the role of lifekeeper than physiotherapy. He wondered what she looked like from a wheelchair.
‘What will you do now?’ Jane said.
‘Gareth Brewer was to have succeeded Aidan Lloyd as Man of Leaves – as the soul of the morris. For a while anyway. To get us past the solstice. Early this morning, like I said, Garry came to see Lionel to tell him he was having to step down as the Man.’
‘This is about my mother, right?’
‘She seems to have convinced him the morris is harmful.’
‘I’m not sure that’s quite right.’
‘The Church has always been that way. Anything it doesn’t understand it mistrusts. Like any attempt by ordinary people to develop their higher faculties. You hear that everywhere. Priests who warn kids off Harry Potter – doorway to black magic.’
Lol couldn’t let this go by.
‘You don’t think she was just trying to help him deal with something he couldn’t personally handle? That was damaging his sleep, his family life, his… mental health?’
‘I guess what Lionel would tell you, if he could bring himself to speak to you, is that she interfered with a process – a rite of passage. A transition. The transference of something from Aidan to Gareth.’
Lol saw Jane kind of vibrate.
‘You’re talking about the spirit of the Man of Leaves,’ Jane said. ‘The Green Man.’
Nora nodded.
‘If you like. Let’s just call it the essence of what Maryfields is about. And has been since Lionel’s dad split from Iestyn Lloyd and all he represents. It’s no big conundrum.’
‘Whatever it was,’ Lol insisted, ‘Brewer couldn’t handle it.’
‘Lionel would say you’re in no position to know that. That you don’t understand that all rites of passage have an element of ordeal. That to achieve the objective you have to go with the suffering.’
‘And take your wife and kids along for the ride?’
Nora frowned.
‘He called the Bishop, Nora,’ Lol said. ‘He’d learned that Brewer had gone to Merrily for help and he tried to get her warned off. Using his influence as a patron of Kilpeck Church. He didn’t even try to call Merrily, he just went over her head. No worries about the trouble he might be causing for her. Titled guys talk to bishops.’
‘Aw, Jeez.’ Nora sighing. ‘That isn’t… this wasn’t supposed to be difficult. You’re a mild-mannered, soft-spoken, innocent kind of guy. Unsure of yourself. Maybe a little timid.’
‘With a history of mental illness.’
Man’s voice. The grey curtains concealing what they’d taken to be a changing area parted on their rings. The man glided in his wheelchair into the treatment room, ragged grey hair falling over his eyes.
Jane, in the path of the big rubber wheels, didn’t move, regarding him with an expression Lol identified as disdain.
‘Asshole,’ Jane said, ‘doesn’t come close.’
46
Forlorn
POCKETING HER MOBILE, Merrily ran through the rain into the Cathedral and directly to the vast Lady Chapel.
Nobody there. She followed the panelled wall to the little Audley Chantry where she sank down before the blazing psychedelia of the Thomas Traherne windows, the fizzing pinks and greens and the whorls of white light. Blasts of transcendence on a filthy day.
After a few minutes, she sighed and stood up. It was only glass. When she came out of the chantry, a woman had arrived and was sitting alone in the Lady Chapel under the quiet gold, the high sculpted walls, all the Marian maternal imagery.
The woman’s hair was wound tight, her smile creased and not benign.
Merrily sat in the next chair, wondered if she should take Sophie’s hand and squeeze it, or if that would seem patronizing; theirs had never been a tactile relationship.
She drew a slow, nervous breath.
‘How long have you known?’
‘Just over a day. But it’s hardly a surprise, is it? And hardly the worst thing to happen this week.’
‘No. I suppose not.’ Merrily looked up at the five Gothic panes above the altar. Pale. Serene. ‘I don’t imagine Innes told you himself.’
Sophie’s laugh was arid.
‘Well, you know, he did actually, Merrily. He telephoned me.’
‘From the Palace? All the way from round the corner?’
‘He said… well, he talked about economic constraints and then he said he realized that many good and faithful servants to the Cathedral were often reluctant to admit, even to themselves, when the workload had become too onerous – i.e., for someone their age – and that it was sometimes up to people like him to act in these good and faithful servants’ best interests.’
‘And kick them down the bloody stairs?’
A more liquid laugh this time from Sophie.
‘What does your husband say?’
‘He’s annoyed on my behalf, naturally, but Andrew’s an architect. He thinks the Cathedral is a building.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘Oh, resign, of course.’
‘What?’
‘What else could I do? Sit there quietly in the gatehouse two days a week while various people wander in to hang their coats on me? No, I shall formally submit my resignation before Christmas. I don’t imagine he’ll want me here in the New Year, do you?’
The Lady Chapel absorbed it. Merrily couldn’t.
‘I don’t believe you’re saying this.’
‘I’ve never been treated like this.’
‘Because of me.’
‘Merrily, don’t be silly. Innes is trying to reduce his staffing costs, and he doesn’t particularly like me anyway.’
‘He doesn’t trust you. Because of me. Did he mention deliverance?’
‘Of course not.’
‘No, he wouldn’t.’
‘That’s my greatest regret, of course. I’ve always accepted that unless you were to move on I’d be gone from here long before you, I just didn’t think it would happen so quickly. Anyway, as I’ve been eased out of the inner circle, I’m not going to be much of a loss. Merrily’ – Sophie, surprisingly took both her hands, shaking them gently up and down, looking directly into her eyes – ‘don’t look so forlorn. You’re a much stronger person than you were when we first met.’
‘No, I’m not. I just know who my friends are. I think.’
Sophie let go of her hands.
‘What happened last night?’
‘Oh God, I haven’t really had time to think about it.’
‘Well, do try. I haven’t gone yet.’
‘Unlike Julie Duxbury.’
‘That…’ Sophie whispering now. ‘… will change everything.’
Talking to Sophie, as usual, brought clarity. They talked about the police visit to the gatehouse. What Merrily had revealed and what she hadn’t, why that might be dangerous.
Sophie didn’t find it particularly worrying.
‘As far as the police are concerned, the deliverance aspect will simply be seen as something best avoided. It doesn’t speak their language. Within the Church, however, the appallingly deliberate murder of Julie Duxbury will affect everything. Whoever is responsible, it’ll reverberate, not only here but nationally. And the fact that the poor woman’s last night in this world involved an element of exorcism will be noted. And underlined.’
‘Very few people know about it. Nobody’s going to tell the media. I hope.’
‘Of course not. But it’ll filter through within the
Church. As these things do.’
‘Thanks to Crowden.’
‘The Archdeacon…?’
‘Told me about him.’
‘This man poking around like some sort of private investigator is inconvenient. Even though Julie Duxbury was not directly involved in your Requiem… even if it turns out she was attacked by some deranged prowler, mentally damaged or high on Class A drugs, her death will be linked.’
‘I’ll write you a full report for the database, although certain details will be omitted for obvious reasons. I’d like to tell you, however.’
It took nearly half an hour, of low voices and looking over shoulders. Occasionally there would be footsteps and clips of conversation from the arteries of the Cathedral, but nobody came in.
‘Criminal offence,’ Sophie said. ‘You can’t cover up a criminal offence.’
‘I already have.’
‘These people…’
‘Believed it was happening for a quite logical reason.’
‘On the instructions of Sir Lionel Darvill.’
‘To whom they’re in debt. In various ways.’
‘He tried to stop you interfering, as he saw it.’
‘This is how it gets iffy. I’m ready to accept that there’s some kind of semi-pagan ritualistic thing to which the Kilpeck Morris subscribes. I may not be happy with it personally, and I hate to think of it happening in my churchyard, but if it’s over I’d be tempted to let it go. However… if this is Darvill using men who owed him favours to even the score in a private feud by doing something illegal, gruesome and deeply distasteful…’
‘That’s why you went ahead with the Requiem?’
‘Because I thought that Gareth Brewer – and Aidan Lloyd, too, if you want to go further down a dark road – deserved to be free of it.’
‘In which case, you did the right thing. But why would Darvill put so much at risk? He could be looking at a prison sentence. Pride? Family pride? I do realize this is an area where family feuds are a way of life, but surely…’
‘I can’t turn away now, Sophie. If Julie’s murder is linked to it…
Sophie looked up at the altar.
‘You could – however difficult you might find it – turn away from that. It’s something for the police. I’m sure we could arrange for them to receive pertinent information without it coming back on anyone innocent.’
‘Yeah, but I wouldn’t be—’
‘No… listen.’ Sophie’s hand on Merrily’s arm. ‘What you won’t be able to turn away from is any information coming back to the Bishop from Sir Lionel Darvill via this man Crowden. Which might not happen today – the Bishop would certainly not want to walk into the middle of a very high-profile murder inquiry. Would never want to risk being questioned by the police, thus bringing everything into the public domain.’
‘Not how he works.’
Merrily was aware of a courtroom echo in the Lady Chapel. And the panelling to the side. She was reminded of her most frequent nightmare, the one set in a dim, panelled room where her risible role as a deliverance consultant was being delicately dissected by some smarmy atheist in a dirty wig.
‘But it will happen,’ Sophie said. ‘It will happen. Perhaps within days. And then I’m afraid you’re in trouble.’
‘Yes.’
47
Go figure
FOR A FEW moments, the only movement in the room was a slow, jagged smile opening up Sir Lionel Darvill’s narrow face, like when a tin-opener was applied to a can.
His battered wheelchair had thick rubber tyres, as from a mountain bike. He was wearing a grey gilet over a white T-shirt with holes in it. His feet were in trainers, his legs in jeans, both spattered with dried mud. His face had seen-it-all lines, like some rock star who’d lived too hard, too fast, and was old at forty.
Jane had come to her feet, taken off her parka, letting it fall in a heap beside her chair. She wore a bright scarlet top and had her hands in the hip pockets of her jeans, as if to prevent herself from using them. Lol saw that she was actually shocked, realizing Darvill had been there all the time, listening to everything, and that Nora had known that.
‘Am I like going to feel guilty later?’ Jane’s hands came out of her pockets as fists. ‘Over hitting a man in a wheelchair? Never done it before. Lol—’
Darvill looked up at Jane, tilting his jaw, as if inviting the first punch. Jane’s fists were clenching and unclenching.
‘Lol went through like… years of total hell. And misplaced psychiatric treatment. It was all wrong, and all these self-satisfied tossers read about it on the Net and—’
Lol said, ‘Jane—’
‘—and it just keeps getting dragged up, all the time. Makes me sick.’
Darvill’s hands had begun slowly to applaud.
‘It’s very kind of you, Jane,’ Lol said, ‘and don’t let me stop you hitting him. It’s just I get the impression he knows this already. All on the Net now. Somewhere.’
‘Only idiots believe what they read on the Net.’ Darvill was easing his chair away from the curtains, its deep-tread tyres leaving mud flakes on the flagged floor. ‘Certainly not self-satisfied tossers. But I shall give you the benefit of the doubt.’
Jane growled. Abruptly, Darvill reversed his chair, spun it round with some flair, like a kid on a skateboard, then looked over his shoulder.
‘Not in a hurry to be sick, are you? Come and see my house.’
The grey curtains concealed a short passage, at the bottom of which was a small, modern door, leading into what had evidently been the stable yard. A sensor somewhere brought exterior lights on, one of them a lantern over a Gothic oak door. The sky was grey and purple; unlike last night, there wouldn’t be a starshow.
The oak door opened on its own as the chair approached it. Lol felt a nudge from Jane.
‘It’s him.’
Projecting from the shoulder of the doorway arch was a wooden face: bulbous eyes, a fish-mouth spewing fronds. It looked like part of the arch. That old?
They entered a passage that was quietly lit, low and narrow and rounded, like a wormcast. A wheelchair route. Even Lol had to bend his neck. He caught Nora’s eye and she smiled faintly. Another Gothic door and then they got to straighten up in a square hallway with walls like an old countryman’s skin.
Narrow stone stairs curved away under a fat oak beam. A symbol had been embossed on the middle of the beam: three concentric squares, with lines and dots marking out what seemed like a simple maze. Jane was staring up; she clearly didn’t know what it meant either. Darvill saw them looking up at it.
‘Hold that in your mind,’ he said.
Jane frowned. Nora crossed the hallway to a door of wide oak panels, ridged and dented as if the door had been kicked open by generations of farm boots. The latch was halfway down, and she bent to lift it, and Darvill glided through, Nora holding the door open for Jane and Lol.
On the other side of the doorway, the whole atmosphere changed.
‘Sit anywhere,’ Nora said. ‘But make sure you do sit.’
But Jane just stood there, taking in the kind of soft, muffling silence you only experienced deep in the countryside in winter. Like, real winter, with snow drifts outside. She turned to find Nora, but Nora was gone, back through the doorway, leaving a trail of laughter behind her, light as a chiffon scarf.
‘Blimey,’ Jane said.
There were a few well-worn rugs on the floor but they were sidelined by a flagged alleyway of rosy stone all the way to the fireplace in its cavernous stone inglenook. A log fire was the focus of the room. That and the painting hanging above it, flat to the wall, no frame, illuminated by a downlighter.
‘Sit,’ Darvill said. ‘Don’t want a crick in my neck.’
Jane moved to the nearest of two sofas, a sagging, ochre-coloured Chesterfield, side-on to the hearth. Sat with her parka scrunched up on her knees like a security blanket. There were also two armchairs that didn’t match and one long, low table with a magazine on i
t: Dowsing Today, journal of the British Society of Dowsers. Jane and Lol ending up either end of the sofa, their backs to the two tightly wooded windows, opposite a wall of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Apart from a pole with a brass hook on the end leaning against the shelves and a basket of logs, that was it for furnishings.
Darvill cruised down the flagged alley, stopping with his back to the bookshelves. They were rudimentary, separated by stone blocks and bowed with books. Not stately-home type books, those static matching sets with leather bindings, but real books that had been read and read. Some books that Jane had read, familiar spines: The Secret History of the World, Daimonic Reality, The View over Atlantis, The Book of English Magic. A library of deep mystery. Jane began to feel a muted excitement. She turned to the fireplace and what was above it.
A huddle of big logs were fusing in ashy pink and orange on the hearth, but the real heat seemed to be coming from the painting.
Unmistakably Kilpeck Church. The view was from the lane below its mound, under the curved apse. Looking up towards the little bell tower, behind which the setting sun had vanished leaving only an amber smear, while a post-sunset deep blue claimed most of the sky.
The church itself was a glowing ember.
‘Like it’s swallowing the setting sun,’ Jane said.
Darvill smiled.
‘Reminds me of somebody,’ Lol said. ‘Famous painter. Victorian, or earlier. Moonlit fields.’
‘Who in particular?’ A forefinger compressing Darvill’s stubbled left cheek. ‘Go on, Robinson. Try someone.’
‘Can’t think of the name. Famous for his harvest moons. Fields full of ripe hay you could almost smell. Intoxicating. Somewhere down in… Kent? Samuel Palmer?’
‘Congratulations,’ Darvill said.
‘Palmer came here?’
‘Don’t imagine so. Even better. This is a Tom Keating. Legendary faker of old and modern masters who specialized in Palmers. You ever see that old TV documentary of Keating at work – as Palmer? When he was getting it right he’d go to pieces, dissolve into breathless sobs. Very moving.’
‘I didn’t see that.’
‘Could’ve been he was just bloody good at faking emotional responses for the camera. But that was what appealed to my old man who commissioned this a few years before Keating died, in the 1980s. Posted him a stack of photographs to work from. “Do me a Palmer, Tom. Let the old bugger work his magic on my place.” He actually meant work with the earth magic. And Tom did, God bless him. Remarkable thing was that my old man told him nothing about what sometimes happened to Kilpeck Church at sunset. Which of them got it so right, do you reckon, Keating or Palmer?’
