by Phil Rickman
‘We met up one Saturday. After Christmas.’
‘You and Robbie?’
‘He just wanted to come here again. Walk round the town and stuff and then come here. I mean, I liked him, but I couldn’t… I felt…’
‘Did he call you Marion then? While you were with him?’
‘Went home.’
‘You were feeling… bit suffocated?’
‘And then he kept sending me all this stuff from the Net. Pictures that took ages to download. It got… ’Cos this was when she was…’
‘Who was? Jemmie?’
Sam sniffed. ‘Giving me all this grief. How she was going to take an overdose. How she was going to dope herself up and jump in the river. Rings up at night and texting and stuff. I had to switch my phone off, said I’d lost it. And like every time I switched on the computer there’d be like nineteen e-mails and a pile of attachments and stuff.’
‘From Robbie?’
‘Yeah.’ Sam started to cry again. Steve Britton ducked under a low doorway and came in and straightened up, shaking his head — Sandy Gee waving at him to keep quiet.
‘And he’s, like, making plans for the Easter holidays,’ Sam said. ‘How I can get there on the train and what we’ll do, and she’s like, Oh, I’m really depressed, you’re the only friend I’ve ever had, and why don’t we go away together?’
‘That must’ve been… difficult.’
‘Up all night some nights, on the computer. Dear Sam. Dear Marion. It just…’
‘You didn’t tell anybody?’
‘Nnn. I was really tired this night, and I sent Robbie one back, and I’m like, please stop sending me stuff, OK, and no I can’t come to Ludlow at Easter ’cos we’re going to France, and like… I could’ve been nicer about it, you know?’
‘But you were overtired, right?’ Sandy said.
‘Read it back next day, and I thought, like, what’ve I done? So I e-mailed him back and I said I was really, really sorry and how I’d been really tired and I had a headache. But he never replied.’
‘When was this?’ Lol asked.
The kid’s face was moon-pale. ‘Two weeks before he died.’
‘There was no connection,’ Lol said. ‘You’ve got to understand that.’
‘He killed himself!’ Sam breathed in, like a hollow shudder. ‘They said it was an accident, but I knew it wasn’t. He kept writing to me that he could feel her… me… her… with him. He used to come here at weekends, and he said he could… And I was really like—’
‘Sam…’ Lol moved to the foot of the scaffolding, held on to the bars so she could see his hands, know he wasn’t trying anything. ‘What happened after he died?’
She was a long time in replying. Somebody, thank God, had managed to stop the choir. Through the ground-floor window, half-barred, you could see the river, silver and black.
‘Couldn’t sleep,’ Sam said. ‘I had these nightmares. There was this one where I switched on the computer and there were all these e-mails and they all said, Dear Marion, and I’d be like scrolling up and scrolling up, and they’d just like go on for ever. Dear Marion, dear Marion, dear—’
She made a noise like a yawn that pitched up into a kind of squeak of distress.
‘Let me get you some hot chocolate,’ Sandy said.
‘Noooo!’
‘All right… it’s OK.’
‘What happened then?’ Lol said.
It was clear that Steve Britton hadn’t found Merrily. Where was she? This was becoming—
‘Told my friend,’ Sam said. ‘At school. Her name’s Bex. I thought she was my friend. I told her — like in confidence, you know? — and she’s like, Wow, this Marion’s ghost’s taken him. And she went and told these other kids, and then everybody’s like, Oh, you killed Robbie Walsh, you killed Robbie Walsh. You’re like a witch, or something.’
Sandy Gee sighed.
‘So I’m getting all this grief at school and I don’t want to go, and I’m faking being ill and stuff, and I’m getting into rows at home, ’cos my mum and dad, they think I’m going to be like a brain surgeon or something.’
Lol glanced at Sandy: We’ve managed to find the parents now… insists she doesn’t want to see them.
‘And then I saw Jemmie Pegler in Ledbury, and she’s telling me how she’s found all these suicide websites about how to kill yourself with a plastic bag and stuff. Copied one of them over.’
‘She copied the suicide site to you?’
‘And like I was sure she’d heard about me and Robbie Walsh and she was just being cruel — ’cos she was like that, you know? And I was like really angry, and I just started sending her all this stuff Robbie had sent me, about Marion and the Hanging Tower and I’m like, why don’t you like try this instead of a poxy plastic bag, and…’
‘Take it easy, Sam,’ Sandy said. ‘This is very important, what you’re telling us.’
‘So she starts phoning me at home on the main phone, and I keep pretending I’m not there, and then somebody tells me at school, like do you know Jemmie’s got a syringe and she’s shooting up, and I thought, like, she’d just told them to tell me that so I’d feel sorry for her again. And then she e-mails and says will you come to Ludlow with me and we’ll throw ourselves off the tower — like together — and become free of our bodies.’
‘What did she mean?’
‘I don’t know. It was all this stuff she’d had off the Net — like somebody got hold of the Robbie story and they’ve twisted it all around. And I couldn’t take any more, and it was late at night, and I sent back, yeah, yeah, we’ll go tomorrow.’
‘Oh God,’ Sandy murmured.
‘And she bloody did. She went. She came here, and I didn’t, and she threw herself—’
Sam let out a wail of despair and spun herself back at the window space, Sandy Gee shouting, ‘Sam!’ but grabbing Lol’s arm as he made a move towards the scaffolding.
He could hear Sam vomiting out of the death-fall window, and then she slumped back down, squatting under the window with her head in her hands.
Sandy hissed, ‘Now, will you do something?’
‘No Merrily?’
‘No sign at all. They’re still looking. You’ll have to do something.’
‘Sandy, listen—’
‘No, you listen to me…’ Sandy pulled him through a doorway he hadn’t noticed, into a chamber the size of a lavatory, steps going up, sealed off with masonry. ‘There was an incident earlier on when we nearly lost her. When she thought Jemmie Pegler was hovering on the other side of the window… as if she’d come rising up again from where she’d fallen — that even spooked me, I can tell you. And it’s what she’s been seeing in dreams, Martin, night after night, and now she’s afraid to go to sleep and she’s keeping herself awake all night. Look at her — she’s overtired, overwrought. We’ll have to bring lamps in soon, or she’ll use the darkness to… Twice she’s started talking to somebody who isn’t there.’
‘What did Nigel Saltash say about that?’
‘He talked about hallucinations and psychological projections. He said there are— Look, it doesn’t matter what he—’
‘Drugs he could give her to sort it out?’
‘Yeah, more or less. We sometimes assume if someone’s a highly qualified psychiatrist they’re also experienced in counselling, and if he’d talked to me the patronizing way he talked to her I’d have jumped two hours ago. I’m not trying to discredit what he does, all I’m saying is, if she’s hallucinating Jemmie Pegler and her fat-girl talk, leave our bodies behind—’
‘Jemmie was clearly a dominant, parasitical presence,’ Lol said. ‘From whichever side of the fence you want to see it, that doesn’t necessarily go away with death.’
‘You’d know better than me. But this morning it’s in the papers about the exorcism and, like Steve keeps saying, she’s seen the films. She’s convinced she’s haunted.’
‘Convinced herself she deserves to be haunted.’
�
�Exactly. By Jemmie and by Robbie Walsh and by the very thought of this place. So she’s caught a train and she’s here, and she’s in the famous Hanging Tower, saying, why aren’t they doing it? So don’t you tell me to wait any longer, Martin, because it’s going dark and when it’s dark there’s even less reality, isn’t there? And I’m afraid you’re the only priest we’ve got.’
46
Gridiron
Merrily didn’t know what she’d expected, and she’d walked into the doorway of Jon’s flat before she could change her mind, and the smell — the mixture of smells — came out at her, so dense it was like a smearing of dirty colours on her face.
Oh God, God, God…
What she saw… she had nothing to compare it with. You could live in the countryside for years but contrive never to enter an abattoir.
‘Don’t go in,’ George Lackland whispered. ‘Please don’t go in.’
‘No.’
She stood in the doorway. No need at all to go in. Stood in the doorway for… how many seconds, minutes? George’s echo-chamber breathing behind her. And no breathing, no movement at all, inside. Only silence full of stench, as if the atmosphere itself had congealed around it — something so terminally extreme that it had to be environmentally contained.
Oh God, God, God.
What made it worse was that Jonathan — it was Jonathan, wasn’t it? Keep looking, be certain, be absolutely certain — appeared to be naked. No clothing to soak up the blood and obscure the wounds. Only the paper, scattered like toilet tissue in a public lavatory when the drains were blocked.
‘I can’t use the phone in there,’ George said.
‘No. No, we mustn’t touch anything.’
She saw that the papers were newspaper and magazine cuttings and also photocopies of news cuttings and printouts from websites, and there were scores of them… Hundreds, in fact. Most of them about music.
All of them about Belladonna: pictures of her and words about her. Belladonna’s high-grain, monochrome face soaking up the lifeblood of Jonathan Scole who had been Jonathan Swift and was now…
She must have sobbed — it was what happened to your breath in moments of immeasurable stress. Felt George’s hands gripping her shoulders.
She said, ‘Not in my worst…’
The papers had been torn and slashed. Like Jonathan, who was curled on his side, foetal, except for the angle of his head where his throat had been pierced, his face flung back and opened up like a blood orange. A face of multiple expressions, now, like double exposures, like a portrait by Francis Bacon.
Torn-up news cuttings had been scattered over his lower body, glued to it by the blood where Jonathan had been cut and stabbed and slashed, and cut and stabbed and slashed, over and over and—
With the full acceptance that if she was any kind of a real priest she should be saying a prayer for the eternal peace of the savagely, senselessly slain, Merrily stood back and kicked the door shut.
With a wheeze like an explosion of breath, it sprang back, and there was Jonathan again, the wafting of air lifting a piece of newsprint from one of his eyes as if he’d blinked at the repeated intrusion, and Merrily slammed a foot flat against the door and pushed it hard away from her. Keeping the foot clamped there, on the stained panelling, as if she was holding back a tide of blood, until the door clicked. And then she stood at the top of the steps, with George a few steps below her, and just took in air.
‘Whoever did this…’ George looking up at her, the knuckle-bump in his forehead gleaming like a big pearl, ‘must look like… like a bloody butcher. How can she be walking the streets?’
‘In a long coat.’ She followed him down the steps.
At the bottom they just stood there, and George said, ‘Are you all right?’
‘Well, no,’ she said. ‘Not exactly.’
‘Come to my house.’
Merrily sagged. Her lighter fell from the torn pocket of her fleece and bounced on the cobbles.
‘I made a terrible mistake, George.’ She bent to pick up the lighter, but denied herself a cigarette. ‘The worst mistake I’ve ever made, and, by God, I’ve made some.’
‘Mrs Watkins—’
‘I have a qualified, not to say eminent, psychiatrist I’m supposed to work with. And, because I didn’t like him much, I kept him completely in the dark about most of this.’
‘Mrs Watkins, we all kept people out of this. I wanted Bernard to see to it, as a friend, and Bernard passed it on to you. It was all in confidence. I wanted to keep the lid on — that’s the top and bottom of it.’
‘And I resisted’ — putting a hand to the top of her chest to try and stop herself panting — ‘every inclination to think this woman was clinically insane.’
Even as she’d stood clamping the door shut with her foot, she’d been resisting it. Thinking, could this have been someone else? Some enemy from back home in the north? Someone who’d been trying to find him? If his parents’ murder had been contracted…
Oh, sure. And plastered him with Belladonna cuttings. There was no story-book twist here; it was as messy and unfathomable as any open-and-shut killing. The level of rage that could have driven a woman to this was beyond all comprehension, but wasn’t that always the case? Dear God.
‘We’ll go to my house,’ George said, as though he was helping a child to cross the road. ‘Phone the police from there. Come on.’
They came out of the alley into Corve Street, into George Lackland’s town. Plenty of people still around in the powdery dusk, Tesco’s still open. A tourist coach waiting at the lights.
Over the gravelly sound of the coach engine came the church clock chiming eight. Instinctively, Merrily glanced up to the tower and glimpsed movement at the top: a figure in Palmers’ Guild blue moving across from one corner pinnacle to another. Or the distinctive blue of a stockman’s coat.
They had reached the first narrow window of Lackland Modern Furnishings.
‘George,’ she said, casual as she could manage. ‘Do you think you could report it?’
‘I was going to.’
‘I mean without mentioning me. Not yet. Please? I need some time.’
He stared down at her. ‘You’re feeling ill.’
‘No, I’m—’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Do you think I could borrow the keys to the church? I have to… work something out.’
As if she meant she needed to pray. She hoped he would understand that. And anyway, he’d know the truth of it soon enough.
Everybody would.
Lol leaned against the wall outside and knew why Merrily smoked.
He felt faintly sick. He wanted to be on the other side of these walls, looking for her. She would not just have walked off. She would wait. She was good at waiting. He needed her, and the girl needed her, needed someone who could…
… legitimately intercede.
The movements of police and paramedics around the Inner Bailey were becoming shadowed. The Keep, now the gatehouse, was a charcoal monolith.
‘I hope you know what you’ve done, Mr Robinson.’
He didn’t know how long the woman had been standing by his side.
‘Where’s Saltash?’
‘He’s gone.’ She didn’t look at him. ‘I don’t think he’ll be coming back tonight. He suggested I might be wise to leave also. Let Mrs Watkins’ — the name was expelled like prune stones — ‘take over.’
‘You’ve seen her?’
‘No. I thought she might already be here. Or perhaps she’s with the television people. Doing what she does so well.’
Lol looked at her austere profile. The clouds that had suffocated the sun were relaxing into evening, admitting a wafery moon. Her hair was curling up from the collar of her jacket.
‘What is it with you, Ms…’ Couldn’t remember her damn name.
‘Siân will do. What’s up with me, as I think you already know, is that my and Merrily’s attitudes to the practice of Christianity in a secu
lar age are… incompatible. Never made much of a secret of that. Putting it simplistically, I think there’s no room for superstition in what we do, while she appears to nurture it.’
‘In which case — sorry to be so naive — why would you want to be connected with Deliverance? What’s your agenda?’
Siân looked across the enclosure, dark as a stagnant pond now, towards the Keep with its drooping flag. She sighed.
‘It begins to look,’ she said, ‘as if the agenda was Mrs Watkins herself. Doesn’t it? The ubiquitous, self-effacing, photogenic Merrily Watkins.’
‘Had her picture in the paper too often? Well…’ Lol shrugged. ‘That was always going to happen. She hates it. But if you do what she does and… and you look like she looks, then you’re going to get your picture in the papers.’
‘Who wasn’t here when we — the women of Hereford — were battling for the priesthood. Wasn’t out there with her placard. Wasn’t part of the movement. And was then presented with this outdated but inherently sexy role by a rogue bishop, subsequently discredited. Managing to emerge after his inevitable departure smelling of lavender and honeysuckle. And continuing, for heaven’s sake, to get away with it.’
‘Not always. And not undamaged.’
‘And all of it built on superstition.’ Siân finally turned towards Lol. ‘Do you know what really got to me? How, when she restored evensong in Ledwardine Church — evensong with a fashionably esoteric tweak — it became an immediate talking point because some local woman had apparently been cured of a life-threatening condition.’
‘Which she probably hadn’t had in the first place. Misdiagnosis, or the medical records got mixed up.’
‘Doesn’t matter. It was still all over the Internet, apparently, that the mystical vicar of Ledwardine had healing powers. And the following week it was reported — not in the Church Times, thank God, one of the other rags — that her congregation had doubled.’
‘Trebled, I think. But she squashed the rumours and it slumped again. So everyone’s happy. Except I expect you were really pissed off that she hadn’t run with it, gone the way of all the other messianic cranks.’
‘Always one step ahead,’ Siân said.
