by Phil Rickman
Because what could Mum have done about this, anyway? Exorcists worked by invitation only.
Clancy had gone to watch TV in Ben and Amber’s private sitting room, some bland early-evening soap. On the bus, Jane had said, on the subject of the White Company, ‘Doesn’t it interest you at all?’ And Clancy had been like, ‘What’s the point of wasting your life imagining you go to some spooky place when you die?’
Huh? They really didn’t have much to say to one another, her and Clancy, did they? Jane sat on the bed and scowled and then dialled the mobile number that Antony had given her.
‘Antony, it’s Jane. I’m sorry to bother you. I don’t know what it’s like with you, but it’s fairly bad here… well, not that bad. I mean, I managed to get in tonight on the bus, and Ben reckons enough of the key people from the White Company are around for it to go ahead. Alistair Hardy’s staying with Beth Pollen, and she’s going to meet some more of them at Hereford Station in a four-wheel drive tomorrow. So like… are you going to make it all right? And if not, what do you want me to do? If you could like let me know. I’ve got some really nice shots of Stanner in the snowstorm. So, like… bye.’
She sat on the bed, huddled inside her fleece. The snow wasn’t thinning at all, was it? Most of the time you just lied to yourself because if you then repeated the lie to someone else it wouldn’t seem like a lie.
Why had she gone out of her way, in the face of the weather and her mother’s dismay, to come back?
Because she was a working woman and, with a conference on, Amber needed all the help she could get. Because she was retained by Antony Largo, on the promise of considerably more money, as a cameraperson. Because if it turned out that the White Company made some historic contact tonight and she’d missed it…
Yeah, mainly that.
Why had she not wanted to come? Why had she actively dreaded being here? Because, on the other side of this unlikely but nonetheless compelling psychic odyssey there was the bloated ghost of Hattie Chancery, her repellent life, her sordid and hideous death.
She gave Eirion another five minutes to call back, then stood up and snapped on the light. No good putting this off any longer. She took off her fleece, pulled her overnight bag from under the bed, found her warmest sweater and put that on, dragging the fleece over the top. She felt a little better, got out the Sony 150 and checked the charge. Then she put out the light and went out onto the top landing, down the second flight of stairs and left at the fire doors.
Had to do this. Had to dispense with it before she could move on. Before she could stop waking up in the morning waiting for the bloody bang.
This morning at the breakfast table, at her most pathetic, she’d nearly cried out to Mum to take it away, to exorcise Hattie Chancery from her subconscious. Like Mum could really do this with a sign of the cross and a pat on the head. Bonkers.
She had to do this — walking down the passage with the Sony held in front of her like an automatic weapon — because it made the difference between being a woman and a child. Because she’d never been in that room with any knowledge of whose room it had been and what she’d done — i.e. the knowledge that Hattie Chancery was the kind of woman, basically, who, in life, Jane would have hated even more than she did as some sick possible presence.
And also the knowledge of the stains under the maroon flock wallpaper, the blood dribbling down the windows.
She intended to walk into the room under the witch’s-hat tower, bring the Sony 150 to her shoulder, demanding, Imprint yourself on that, you brutal bitch. This was a necessary penance.
‘Couldn’t do it.’ Danny had his head in his hands, a bowl of tomato soup cooling on the table at his elbow. ‘In the end, I couldn’t tell him.’ He looked up at Greta. ‘Pathetic, eh?’
‘Could be it’s for the best,’ Greta said, but he could see she didn’t believe that, not for one second.
‘Suppose he’s mad? Suppose he’s ill? Suppose that what we reckoned all these years was perceptiveness, knowingness… suppose that was just signs of his… mental dysfunction.’
‘Big words tonight, Danny.’
‘I en’t thick,’ Danny said. ‘Might’ve lost a few brain cells to acid and metal, since the ole grammar school, but it en’t taken it all away.’
‘Have your soup.’
Danny swallowed some tomato soup. Through the kitchen window, he could see the snow ghosting the farmyard that was foggy-grey with old stone and dusk. No stock out there no more, nothing in the sheds except for his own tractor and Delia, Gomer’s new JCB. Need to have the tractor up and ready tonight, with the snowplough bolted on; this could go on for days.
‘Know what I was scared of back there, suddenly, Gret? That mabbe, if I told him, he’d kill her. Like Geoff James did when his missus—’
‘Danny, this is Jeremy.’
‘Can’t just say that n’more.’ Danny put his spoon down. ‘People goes funny. Same disease: isolation, EC form-filling, stock-tagging, signing all your beasts over to the bureaucrats. No independence, no pride, no satisfaction, no money. You reads the bloody papers, you’d think all country folk’s worried about is what the government’s doin’ to bloody huntin’ with hounds — like it’s fundamental to us all in the sticks, ’stead of just a rich man’s expensive pleasure introduced by psychotic Norman barons. Shit.’
‘You got out,’ Greta reminded him, that soothing tone again. ‘You’re with Gomer now. You sidelined, you en’t part of it n’more.’
‘Jeremy en’t never gonner get out, though, is he? It’s part of him. Part of him’s in the land. Uproot him, he’s dead.’
‘Why should he be uprooted? He’s got a good, solid farm. He’s respected. He’s got—’
‘A good woman? Ole days, see, there was farming marriages, and they lasted. Now you got partners… temp’ry. All right in cities, mabbe, where it’s all temp’ry and you can move on, swap around. In the country, you don’t have continuity — there’s another big word, see — if you don’t have continuity, you’re fucked. Jesus Christ, did I just say some’ing Conservative?’
‘Look,’ Greta said, ‘he won’t be out of his yard at all for days, if it keeps on like this, so unless somebody rings him and tells him about Natalie, he en’t gonner find out nothin’, is he?’
Danny stared into his soup, a pool of blood. He was thinking about Natalie Craven and her mousy little partner, and Ben Foley and his mousy little wife.
Ben Foley, saviour of Stanner. Incomer with attitude, smooth Londoner widely said to be driven by irrational obsessions. Man who showed up on your doorstep asking if you seen the Hound of Hergest.
‘Sign of death.’
Greta gave him a hard look. ‘What is?’
‘The Hound of Hergest.’
‘Let’s not get silly about this,’ Greta said. ‘Jeremy’s ma used to say he was always seeing things that wasn’t there. It’s the way he is. His condition.’
‘That’s what it’s supposed to be, though, ennit, the Hound: an omen of death.’
‘If your name’s Vaughan.’
‘The Vaughans’ve all gone.’
‘Nothing to worry about, then,’ Greta said.
‘Just be honest,’ Merrily said. ‘Tell me what you think I need to do. Tell me I’m overreacting. Tell me it’s time to let go of the leash, cut some slack, sever the umbilical, make some space, chill out. Tell me, Lol.’
‘You know I can’t do clichés.’ Lol took the mobile out into the passage and went across to the stable door, unbolting the top half and pushing against a crust of snow. The section of door opened with a sound like splintering plywood. Somewhere out there was the Frome Valley, as white and cold and barren as an old psychiatric ward he used to know.
‘Tell me there’s nothing to be afraid of,’ Merrily said into his ear, serious now. Snow talk. Unexpectedly severe weather could do this to you. You were no longer in control. Nobody was.
‘I’ll come over,’ Lol said.
‘No. You can’t. Really.
It’s just been on the radio: go home and stay home. Stay off the roads unless it’s an emergency, and even then—’
‘It’s not bad here.’ Lol looked for his car, couldn’t see it. It was nearly dark, and the snow was like a wall.
‘I’ve got enough to worry about without the thought of you stuck all night in a snowdrift in an ancient Astra with a heater that hasn’t worked in years.’
Music started up in the studio behind Lol: a slow, growling twelve-bar blues from the album that Prof Levin was mixing for the guitar legend Tom Storey. A relentless, chugging momentum: life going on.
‘It’s Gomer, that’s all,’ Merrily said. She’d already told him about Ben Foley and the violence and the woman called Hattie Chancery. ‘Gomer’s worried; how often does that happen?’
‘You could phone her. She’s got her mobile?’
‘I could do that, yes. I could go on to her very carefully, stepping on eggshells, knowing that at any time she could lose her temper and cut the call and switch off the mobile, and that’s the link gone for the duration. I could do that. Would you do that?’
There was a gas mantle projecting from the wall, just inside the fire doors. During the murder weekend, Ben had propped the doors open so that you could see the mantle from the stairs, and you were back in Hattie Chancery’s young days, enclosed in a hollow glow.
No mention of Hattie Chancery during the murder weekend. There were murder games, with the scent of mystery, and there was real murder, with its sadness and its stink.
The mantle, unlit, was utility-looking, without romance. No doubt it would be working again when the White Company were in residence. The passage, meanwhile, was lit by electric wall lights — dim vertical tubes under amber-tinted glass. The walls, with their recessed doors, were lined with woodchip paper. The lights turned them yellow.
Jane stood at the entrance to the passage, legs apart, and lingered on the shot. Ought to have brought the tripod really, but she guessed that if she’d gone downstairs to look for it she wouldn’t have come back. As it was, she kept wanting to turn back but wouldn’t permit herself to stop or even to hurry, to get it over with.
Oh, don’t worry about young Jane. Far too down-to-earth. Jane’ll be fine.
He really didn’t care, did he, as long as he came out a winner.
Called me a nancy boy.
A winner against the odds. Whatever it took.
But was she really so different? Jane Watkins: research and second camera. Using Eirion, deceiving Mum. Snatching every new experience to further her own ambitions, hoovering up the dirt on Hattie and the tragic Robert, while despising the White Company as naff and sad.
Capricious and contrary, this Jane Watkins, not a nice person.
Still shooting, Jane walked on, with sour determination, along the passage, where the sharp smell of recent painting failed to obscure the odour of damp and quite possibly rot.
She stopped in front of the last door on the right, the image wobbling. Through the lens, with the recording signal aglow, it was both more exciting and less scary because it was less personal — a professional thing.
The door was like all the other doors in the passage except that it didn’t have a number on it. When she opened it — reaching out to the handle, giving it a quick push and then stepping back, with the camera still running — she realized that it was too dark in there to shoot anything. She put the camera on pause and lowered it, recalling that there were a few steps to a second door that was oak and Gothic-pointed.
Jane stopped briefly at the bottom of the steps. She remembered a pot lampshade hanging from the ceiling. There was a switch somewhere, on an old-fashioned pewter box. But when she hand-swept the walls on either side she couldn’t find it. Perhaps it was at the top. She located the first step with the toe of a trainer, went up carefully, one, two, three, four — was that it?
No — she stumbled — five.
Jane remembered how it had seemed so cool at first, having one of the tower rooms, sleeping under the witch’s hat, with views across the Border.
A shocking cinematic image flared unconjured in her mind: the heavy old service revolver clunking on the floor as Hattie’s head exploded, blonde hair snaking with blood and wet brains, and a splatting on the walls and—
What was it like to have killed? To have done — publicly, without hope of concealment — the one thing you could never reverse, put right, make recompense for. One way or another, your life was over, wasn’t it?
No more tally-ho, no more whoop-whoop.
She felt for the handle of the bedroom door, catching an acrid waxy smell. Furniture polish? The cold clawed through her chunky sweater as though it was cheesecloth, and she thought of Robert Davies lying here in a fever, Hattie hauling the bedclothes from his sweating body. What had Hattie felt like as she carried the service revolver up here? How had she known it was loaded, unless she’d loaded it herself? So was this an outcome that had always been at the back of her mind? Because it really wasn’t a woman’s way of suicide, was it, to blow all your beauty to fragments?
Jane’s hand found the doorknob, cast-iron and globular, grasped it angrily, turned it and went into the bedroom, standing there panting out some kind of mixed-up defiance into the darkness.
Only, it wasn’t dark at all. Hattie Chancery’s room was delicately rinsed in ochre light.
Jane’s senses swam.
She saw a mustard-shaded oil lamp standing on a dressing table of polished oak in front of the central window with its floor-length purple velvet curtains. The light lured a dull lustre from the gilt frames of pictures on the flock wallpaper.
The polish-fumes seared her throat. This was wrong; everything was wrong, many years wrong. She reeled back against the door and it closed behind her with a heavy thunk and an efficient click. The triple mirrors on the dressing table reflected a high, claw-footed bed, and a woman’s figure rising.
And Jane just screamed, high and piercing, like she never had before, at least not since she was very little, as she saw, in the middle mirror, a broad face, with thick fair hair piled up and twisted and eyes that were small and round and pale like silverskin onions.
25
Shifting Big Furniture
The White Company was a band of English mercenaries formed by Sir John Hawkwood in the fourteenth century, best known for its campaigns in Italy. It was also a firm supplying bathroom-related fluffy goods through mail order and two fancy-dress historical recreation societies.
Close to the bottom of the first page, Google finally identified the White Company as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic historical novel, and Merrily clicked on it.
Motley group of English mercenaries led by Sir Nigel Loring… assiduous attention to historical detail…
Nothing, however, to suggest that the novel in any way reflected the central obsession of Doyle’s last two decades.
In under an hour, she’d gathered a mass of background on this: Sir Arthur’s tireless tours of Britain and America, promoting his conviction that spiritualism would alter mankind for ever by making life after death a scientific fact. His blind defence of obvious fakery. His insistence that he’d spoken, at a seance, with his son Kingsley, a victim of the Great War, and his brother Innes. His belief that his sister Annette, over thirty years dead, had communed with Jean, Arthur’s wife, through automatic writing. Eventually, Arthur had acquired his own high-level spirit contact, Pheneas, a scribe from the Sumerian city of Ur, dead for over four thousand years.
A kindly, decent, deluded man.
In the snow-padded silence of the scullery, the phone went off like a burglar alarm. Two phone lines had become a necessary extravagance. Merrily plucked it up, wedging it under her chin while tapping on next, for Page Two.
‘Ledwardine Vic—’
‘Vicar?’
‘Alice.’
‘Vicar, will you be in if I comes round later on?’
‘I… yeah, sure. Wear wellies, though, Alice, because I haven’t bot
hered clearing the drive.’
‘With Dexter,’ Alice said.
‘Oh.’
The digital clock on the desk said 7.18 p.m. The snow had turned the apple trees outside the window into cartoon wraiths. Page Two came up, with its highlighted words: white, white, white…
‘Sorry I’ve been so long getting back to you,’ Alice said, ‘My sisters, they said yes, they’d like to have the Eucharist. Dexter, he en’t so sure.’
‘He’s with you now?’
‘Does two nights a week in the chip shop.’
In a steamy chip shop? With asthma?
‘I en’t letting him go back to Hereford tonight — what if he got stuck in the snow and he couldn’t breathe? How would they get him to the hospital? Will you talk to him, vicar? Will you make him see some sense?’
‘Well, you know, I’ll… I mean, I can try and explain, but I don’t want to—’
‘’Bout half an hour, then?’ Alice said.
On the screen, near the top of Page Two, it said:
The White Company. Established to further the mission of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to prove that the spirit world is an incontestable fact.
Oh.
‘OK,’ Merrily said, ‘fine.’
Replacing the phone with one hand, she clicked the mouse with the other, watching a bulky figure fading up: sagging white moustache, pinstripe suit, watch chain, watchful eyes. Encircling him, like some tragic Greek chorus, other faces less defined — misty faces blinking on and off, like faulty street lamps, in shades of white and grey. And then:
The White Company
welcomes you
Walter was this fat and beaming old git, with a moustache that curled. His wife, Bella, might have been his daughter: turned-up nose, big hair gathered on top of her head. And the kid, this flat-faced kid clutching her hand, could have been Walter’s granddaughter.
