by Phil Rickman
‘You were curious.’
‘I was suspicious.’
‘Why?’
‘Because, I …’ Jane tossed the spoon onto the worktop. ‘Oh, for—’
‘Come and sit down, Jane.’
‘I’m not going to apologize.’
‘What have you to apologize about? You were simply — I would guess — trying to protect your mother.’
Jane said nothing. Siân steepled her fingers.
‘Jane, there are certain issues on which Merrily and I are unlikely ever to agree but, for what it’s worth, I suspect the level of my regard for her somewhat exceeds the level of hers for me.’
Siân’s smile was kind of wan and regretful. Jane didn’t know how to respond and didn’t.
‘I realize that I would hardly have been her first choice for looking after the parish,’ Siân said. ‘She was probably dismayed?’
‘Erm, yeah.’
Jane sat down, near the bottom of the table. Couldn’t get anything right at the moment, could she? Walked right into this one, thinking she was going to nail Callaghan-Clarke first thing in the morning, while her senses were fuddled.
As if.
The tables had been turned, Jane stitched up like a unreliable witness in the box. Stitched herself up, in fact. Mum might almost have predicted it last night: Jane, I don’t want you handling anything.
Siân Callaghan-Clarke, practised in silence, just sat there. Waiting for you to dig yourself further in.
‘OK …’ Jane proceeded with extreme caution. ‘If you knew I was there, in the church … why did you get her to go through it all? All the stuff about me being a not-so-closet pagan, worshipping the goddess in the vicarage garden.’
‘Do you?’
‘No. I mean, I did once, maybe a couple of times, in a half-hearted kind of way, but not any more. And, like, all the stuff about me having an altar in the attic and, like, chanting and trying to raise dark forces, that is total crap. I wouldn’t do that. I mean, OK, I thought about it … an altar. But only as a kind of a focus point. I didn’t … I mean, I was just a kid.’
‘A teen-witch?’
‘Never that much of a kid, Siân.’
‘My apologies.’
‘And, for heaven’s sake, it’s not satanic, is it? She’s making the fundamental mistake that all these ignorant fundamentalists— I mean, Satanism’s just a perverse reversal of Christianity. It doesn’t even qualify as any kind of paganism.’
‘Yes, Jane, I have read my deliverance handbook. And — since you ask — the reason I invited Shirley to pour out everything was that I thought it might help if we both knew the extent of it. There’s one in every parish, Jane. Often more than one — a faction, even.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Probably harmless most of the time, but she needs watching. She might well be used, for instance, by opponents of the plan to re-erect your standing stones in Coleman’s Meadow.’
‘Right.’
‘Although I wouldn’t imagine it would improve their case to any great extent.’
‘No.’
‘Well …’ Siân sat back. ‘And there was I, feeling rather pleased with my success at drawing Shirley out in a way that perhaps wouldn’t have been open to Merrily. I’m sorry you felt the need to put a rather different interpretation on it.’
Jane sagged in her chair.
‘But I’m glad you brought it up this morning,’ Siân said. ‘It says something about you.’
‘Like that I’m a totally immature idiot who shouldn’t be allowed out?’
‘I think the tea should be almost brewed by now,’ Siân said. ‘Would you like to pour for us, Jane? And have you eaten yet, or were you waiting for me?’
Jane stood up and went over to the worktop. Taking the opportunity — which the bloody woman had obviously deliberately just given her — to hide her reddening face.
‘I just want to say, in case you were wondering …’ talking into the mugs ‘… All that stuff about Lol and other women …’
‘It’s nonsense, of course.’
‘You …’ Jane looked up. ‘You do believe that?’
‘I met Mr Robinson once,’ Siân said. ‘He wasn’t what I might have expected.’
‘No. No, he isn’t. Look …’ Jane started talking, in this great, hot rush, before she could stop herself. ‘Why are you really here? Why did you offer to come?’
‘Why do you think I’m here?’
Lawyers. Always elegantly turning your questions around.
All right, then.
‘Mum thinks … that there’s a possibility they’re putting together some kind of carve-up? And that she’s going to end up with about eight parishes and lose the deliverance thing. Or it gets divided up and, like, run by a committee?’
‘I see.’
‘I don’t suppose I should’ve said that, but, you know …’
‘Why not? It’s true.’
‘Oh.’
‘There is such a proposal, and I have been asked to make an unofficial report.’
‘Oh.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Right.’
Siân shrugged.
In the end, the bedroom had been too small to contain Merrily’s emotions. She came out of the shower room and dressed in a hurry: jeans, sweatshirt, trainers. Within ten minutes, she was at the foot of the stairs, sliding back the bolt on the front door of The Ridge, letting herself out into a breeze swollen with rain.
It wasn’t cold and, physically, she was feeling much better. Still slightly … well, not weak exactly, but a bit tender, a bit raw.
Oh, come on … very bloody raw.
The blowing rain was stinging Merrily’s face. Like the Bishop’s veiled threats.
Threats? From good old easygoing Bernie Dunmore? Could she possibly have misheard?
I don’t want to see your position prejudiced.
No. It wasn’t even subtle. It wasn’t veiled at all.
And she’d thought she knew him. Thought he was a friend. But a friend would have said, Come over and we’ll talk about this. There are some things I can’t say on the phone. He hadn’t said that. He hadn’t wanted to talk about it at all. There were other issues they needed to discuss. Of an administrative nature.
And if it was hard to fire an incompetent vicar, it was a lot less complicated to remove a deliverance consultancy from someone who tended to go beyond the brief.
The mist was lifting over the woods in the valley, the landscape forming in a watercolour wash as Merrily walked down the steps to the parking area and the intersecting footpaths, one up to the hill, one down to the church. Behind her the steep, tawny house was silent. Nobody about yet. No real need to be; she was the only guest, and she hadn’t exactly been demanding an early breakfast.
Maybe, by nine, she’d feel up to talking to people.
And then what?
She could go, on her own, to the Master House, suitably attired and equipped with holy water. A straightforward room-by-room blessing. An end to it. Or merely a reprieve, because Bernie Dunmore would know there’d be no easy retrieval of their old relationship.
On which basis, she might just as well ignore the bastard’s instructions and go in search of Sycharth Gwilym.
Angry now, but she cooled it. She unlocked the Volvo, reached behind the driving seat for her waterproof and then, on impulse, tossed it back and climbed in, switched on the engine and let the car slide away, down the hill.
Merrily drove slowly, although there was no other traffic around, not even a tractor or a quad bike. She was looking for a lay-by, a field entrance, a patch of grass verge wide enough to park on. She needed to sit alone somewhere. And listen.
… This sieve of our own needs, desires, fears … what we’re afraid they might really be saying. We’re processing the words, analysing. Our minds are taking an active role. We’re not listening.
In a service with no sermon, it had probably been the best sermon she’d delivered all year.<
br />
She needed to listen. She took a left turn, high hedges either side, trees still laden with a summerload of leaves. The point of the tower of Garway Church, with its bent cross, appeared over the trees.
Why not?
Weighted as it was with the density of the Templars, it was still a church, and Merrily wondered if it was open yet.
Never did find out, though, because that was when the dog ran in front of the car.
36
Only Darkness
She’d pulled hard into the verge, a thorny hedge screeching against the Volvo’s side panels, its scratchy mesh compressed against the window. Finishing up in a cage of brambles, with a back wheel in a shallow ditch and the engine stalled.
Oh God, no …
She’d been travelling at well under thirty m.p.h., but the road was wet and the brakes were spongy. She’d slammed on and gone into a skid on the overflowing verge of grass and mud, letting go of the steering wheel as she was flung back into the seat, the frayed belt slipping and cutting into the side of her neck.
What was she doing in the bloody car, anyway? Driving off in a self-righteous fury. Resentment. Inflated self-esteem. They can’t treat me like this.
Releasing the belt, she inched painfully across the slanting seat, over the gear lever and the handbrake, to reach the passenger-door handle, pushing the door open.
Climbing out and staggering around to the front of the Volvo, Merrily went down on her knees, half-sick with dread, looking underneath.
Couldn’t see. The grass was still knee-high on the verge, around the bumper. She had to lie down on the wet tarmac, edging between the front wheels and …
… Face it, there was unlikely to be more than one Irish wolfhound in this part of Garway.
‘Roscoe?’
With one wheel in the ditch, the other on the edge, the big car was tilted in the undergrowth, its belly hard into the muddy bank. Impossible to squeeze underneath; she just about managed to push her left arm under, feeling around in the soaking foliage.
‘Roscoe!’
Nothing moving under there, only … multiple stabbing pains in her left hand and up the inside of her wrist told her she’d grabbed a handful of nettles.
This was no use, basically; she’d have to get back in and try to shift the car. With extreme care.
Warm breath on the back of Merrily’s neck made her body retract, twisting over onto her side. Like they always did when you were on the ground, he thought she wanted to play; he was standing over her with his nose above her ear, poised and quivering.
‘Oh, Jesus, Roscoe—’
Collapsing into the road in a moment of wild relief, head in her arms, before pulling herself up. The dog waited, panting. His coat was messed up, matted, spiked and sodden, a thorny twig trapped in his collar. He’d been through hedges and perhaps a stream.
Merrily pulled herself up, clothes wet through, cold and clinging. There was no sign of Mrs Morningwood, and it seemed unlikely that she habitually turned her dog out in the mornings to take exercise in fields full of sheep.
Detaching the thorn twig, Merrily slipped a hand under Roscoe’s collar. He squeaked.
‘What’ve you done?’
She ran her hands down his flanks; at some point he squirmed away, as if in pain, but eventually let her lead him to the car. Tried twice to jump in; she had to help him into the back seat before dragging herself back through the passenger door.
The easy bit. She started the engine, one wheel spinning, another spurting mud and the old chassis creaking and moaning as she fought to wrench the Volvo out of the ditch.
Lol had set the alarm. Best to leave early; he had no knowledge of Warwickshire, only its awful motorways.
Prof Levin had called back just short of midnight, as the ashy-pink embers of last night’s hastily built fire had been quietly crumbling into the hearth.
‘Get a pad, Laurence, I’ll give you the directions.’
‘You … actually called him?’
‘I phoned his office, left a message and he was back within half an hour. Must be some call-referral system.’
‘I’m impressed,’ Lol said.
He’d always known Prof had some serious clout in this business, but even so …
‘Hayter and me — first time we’d spoken in some years. I knew he’d get back, if he was in the country, if only because he was always on at me to tell him what happened at the Abbey on the anniversary of Lennon’s murder.’
‘You told him that?’
Lol knew two other people who’d been involved in this notorious, myth-soaked session. Neither of them, nor even Prof, had ever disclosed what had taken place, and it wasn’t something that had ever bothered Lol. The dark, narcotic side of the music business, like parts of the Old Testament, was best left alone if your faith was shaky. So this — telling Hayter — was above and beyond, and it spoke less of Prof’s friendship with Lol than his admiration for Merrily and what she did. The explicit nature of which, Prof would often say, was not something on which, as a recovering alcoholic, he ever wanted to dwell.
‘I told him some of it, Laurence. He won’t put it around, if only because everybody knows he wasn’t there.’
‘But he’ll see me?’
‘And you will see him, that’s the downside. Eleven-thirty in the morning. You get half an hour. You don’t get lunch. You owe me one, needless to say.’
‘I think I do.’
‘You also owe it to me to listen. I may have said this earlier — Hayter, if he’s doing business, prefers to deal with people in the flesh, rather than talk on the phone or exchange emails. This is because he needs to have them exposed to the full awesome glory of his repellent personality. But do not make the mistake of thinking this is all special effects, you know what I’m saying?’
Lol shook his head.
‘You still there, Laurence?’
‘I’m nodding,’ Lol said. ‘It’s because my mouth’s gone dry with fear.’
‘It’s not a joke. And be sure you call me afterwards. If you still have fingers to push the numbers.’
Now, memorizing his route from the map book, Lol looked at the clock on the desk. He needed to call Merrily, to find out exactly what she wanted to know from Hayter, but it was probably too early. He’d leave it an hour and, meanwhile, get on the road.
His stuff was still in the hall where he’d left it yesterday. The Guild acoustic amp, the Takamine jumbo, the exquisite lute-shaped Boswell, the harmonicas and the little drum machine. Loading and unloading the truck without injury to the kit was getting to be a serious chore. He just couldn’t imagine years of this.
He put Merrily’s number in the frame on his mobile.
Merrily had never really looked at the Morningwood house in the light of day, too fever-ridden yesterday morning to take it in. With its shambling pergola, its rampant chicken wire and its chaos of sheds, it was an almost comical contrast to the manicured holiday homes at the other end of the terraced row.
The only one of them, though, with any signs of life: the smoke like a curl of wispy hair above the chimney stack, the clutter of free-range chickens.
But if Morningwoods had been on this hill as long as the badger shit on the White Rocks, it hadn’t always been here at Ty Gwyn. This row couldn’t be more than a century and a half old, its angles too sharp, doors and windows too regular, too uniform for real age.
The rain had stopped, but dirty pink clouds were still bunched like muscles over the hills. Not a promising day. The car window was halfway down, Roscoe’s snout halfway out, his head up against Merrily’s hair. She could hear the chickens from the sloping land behind as she drew up in front of the two end houses. Blocking the lane, but it was a dead end; apart from Mrs Morningwood, it seemed unlikely that anyone else would be here until next spring.
‘Roscoe, I’m going to leave you in the car, in case she’s out looking for you or something. OK?’
Maybe this visit was meant. She thought about the Prince of
Wales, his attention to coincidences and signposts.
It was just gone seven-thirty. At the front door, she looked around for a bell or a knocker. Sense of déjà vu — at this stage yesterday, she’d been ill and the door had been opened for her. Lifting a fist to beat on the panels, she thought she could hear movement from the back of the house … or one of the others, the holiday homes?
She glanced along the terraced frontage of emptied hanging baskets, smokeless chimneys. At Mrs Morningwood’s end of the block, there was a long fence reinforced with chicken wire, lining an unmade drive leading to a carport with a roof of galvanized sheets.
Under the carport was the back end of an old black Jeep Cherokee. Merrily glimpsed a figure moving along the side of the garage towards a barn or a stable.
‘Mrs Morningwood?’
She stopped, up against the house wall. The figure kept on moving, looking back just once, on the edge of the barn.
It didn’t look like Mrs Morningwood. It didn’t look like a woman. It didn’t seem to have a face, only a darkness.
Come on, this didn’t mean a thing. It didn’t mean a thing that the back door was ajar, like another door had been last summer, or that curtains were drawn across two downstairs windows, like on the days of funerals when she’d been a kid.
But still Merrily drew a long breath, and still it came back out as Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, half oath, half prayer.
And, because she really didn’t want to, she went in.
Entering the kitchen to the smell of something overboiled and a rumbling, refrigerator or a Rayburn, overlaying a sound from deeper into the house, like a roll of carpet being dragged across the floor.
Call out? She opened her mouth to do it, but no sound came.
A door was half-open to the living room — the treatment room where she’d spent most of yesterday. Merrily stayed just short of the doorway. A dimness in there and a drifting smell, salty and sour. A smell that had not been apparent yesterday, a smell she half-recognised and …
OK, phone.
She pulled out her mobile, switched it on and then plunged it back into her hip pocket, cupping both hands over the bump. One day she’d figure out how to mute the electric piano chord that told you — and everybody else — that the phone was awakening.
