by Phil Rickman
‘If we assume that Bella read the Vaughan legend, what would have stood out?’
‘The baby,’ Jane whispered.
‘And she now had one of her own. A little Vaughan. A genuine heir to all this — the whole huge tradition. A tiny descendant of the Princes of Brecknock. And she could never admit it. I don’t know anything about Walter Chancery, but taking over the house built by your tame architect is one thing… living in your wife’s lover’s mansion with his child… very different.’
‘This is totally mind-boggling,’ Jane said.
‘And may not be true,’ Beth Pollen said, rather desperately now.
‘But she was a serious follower of the big new fashion for spiritualism.’ Merrily took a long breath, wishing it carried nicotine. ‘I think when she read about the baby, she conceived the idea of somehow — and we can’t know the details — of somehow presenting the child, Hattie, to her heritage. And more specifically, to her father. The medium…’
‘Wouldn’t the medium have given it away, Mrs Watkins? If her father had spoken through Erasmus Cookson?’
‘No.’ Jane was on her feet. ‘Because Cookson was from London. Bella had him brought in. He just had to have been a mate, someone she could trust not to pass on anything indiscreet until afterwards.’
‘But the priests…’
‘Window dressing, I suspect,’ Merrily said. ‘This is a woman who was secretly bereaved, desperate for psychic contact with her lover. Suppose she’d planned, at some stage, to leave Walter for Rhys Vaughan? Perhaps he’d told her that when the house was finished… I don’t know. We can’t know.’ She glanced at Alistair Hardy. ‘And where Conan Doyle comes in, I’ve no idea at all.’
Beth Pollen sighed. ‘We might as well try and finish the story. My researches suggest that it was Walter who invited Conan Doyle. I think… I think it was probably true that Doyle, a man with a strong sense of what was right and wrong, would have been appalled to find a baby brought into something like this. And I suppose that, being the man he was, he wouldn’t be able to rest until he’d found out what was behind it. Perhaps Bella begged him to keep quiet, and so…’
‘That was why he switched The Hound to Devon?’ Jane said.
‘Impossible to say, isn’t it? It could have been something fairly shocking that happened at the seance.’
‘The baby starts croaking in Welsh?’ Jane smiled malevolently.
‘I suppose we were all hoping something might be confirmed this weekend,’ Beth said.
Alistair Hardy was sitting upright, like Dr Bell, with his arms folded. ‘You didn’t tell me any of this, Beth.’
‘No,’ Beth said, almost distantly, and Merrily guessed that this had been a test for him. That Beth’s commitment to spiritualism was less unquestioning than her colleagues in the White Company had supposed. That Alistair Hardy had perhaps conveyed messages from her husband that she wanted to believe and yet…
Poor woman. If Hardy, as Dr Bell, Conan Doyle or even himself, had been able to reflect any aspect of a story which was unsupported by anything in print, his stature would have been confirmed, at least in Beth Pollen’s estimation. As it was, he remained iffy.
‘That’s all I know,’ Merrily said.
Beth Pollen said, ‘Perhaps it’s best if we leave it there.’
‘Is that what you want?’
‘No. We can’t, can we? There’s a woman behind that door over there who’s either a totally evil human being or a human being to whom evil was… bequeathed. We can’t alter what happens to her, but we can try to stop it here.’
Merrily nodded.
‘Hattie was unbaptized,’ Beth said. ‘I’m sure there’s a psychiatrist or a geneticist somewhere who can put it into terminology that wouldn’t cause anyone any embarrassment, but it seems likely that that night she acquired what we poor country folk can only describe as The Curse of the Vaughans.’
Merrily looked across the room at Jeremy Berrows, who knew.
‘Why don’t we see what Arthur Conan Doyle had to say? Go back to the Baskerville curse. Who invited evil into Baskerville Hall?’
‘Hugo,’ Jane said. ‘A wild, profane and godless man, in the seventeenth century, at the time of the Civil War. Hugo promises to “render his body and soul to the Powers of Evil” if he can catch up with the wench. No real parallel there, Beth.’
‘Oh, I’ve tried jolly hard to come up with one. The nearest I can get is Ellen Gethin. I often wonder if Ellen didn’t offer herself to the Powers of Evil if she was granted the opportunity — and the physical strength — to avenge her brother.’
‘But did she?’ Merrily wondered. ‘I mean, did she? That’s a very familiar story. I bet you’ll find slightly different versions all over the country.’
‘Well, yes, and Ellen does seem generally to have been a good and faithful woman, who mourned for her husband, buried his headless body, never married again. Nonetheless, what we’re looking at, surely, is a curse, a genetic disposition, what you will, following a female line. Hattie killed her husband, Paula killed herself and… Natalie…’
‘Natalie may also have been involved in the death of her cousin,’ Merrily said. ‘We can speculate for ever about where it came from, but three generations that we know of…’
‘So. What do we do, Mrs Watkins?’
The big question. Alice: We needs it now, more than ever — the big white bird.
Ancestral healing. The healing of the dead.
Dexter: Should never’ve gone round askin’ questions, rakin’ it all up.
Jeavons: It’s how we develop within ourselves — by suffering through our failure and trying again and suffering some more. We suffer, Merrilee.
The globe of the table lamp was shining like a full moon. Merrily walked over to it.
‘We can only apply actual exorcism to something demonic and believed to be… not of human origin. Perhaps that’s why, in the old story, Vaughan describes himself as a devil. Makes it legit. Hattie Chancery, however… I mean, she might not have been a terribly nice person for part of her life, but…’
The TV producer, Antony Largo — egalitarian denims, wide and sceptical smile — said from behind his camera, ‘This sounds like what my old man would’ve described as namby-pamby liberalism.’
‘No… basic Christianity.’
‘Oh, right.’
‘However, I don’t want to underplay it. What I had in mind was to wait until first light and then hold a Requiem Eucharist, for Hattie Chancery. For anyone who isn’t conversant with this, it’s basically a funeral service, with Holy Communion. And the aim, essentially, is to bring peace to Hattie and bring Jesus Christ into this place.’
Antony Largo smiled at Amber. ‘Story of your life here. Never get the ones who pay for the rooms.’
Merrily sighed. ‘Just a guess, Mr Largo… you’re not a Christian, right?’
‘Astute of you to notice, Mrs Watkins.’
‘And honest of you to admit it—’
‘Oh, I’m actually quite proud of it.’
‘—Because it kind of rules you out.’
‘I’m sorry?’ Largo frowned. ‘Rules me out?’
‘And, in fact, anyone else who isn’t a Christian. We can’t afford to take this lightly. It’s not like the Chancerys’ exorcism, with fake priests. Has to be the real thing or it’s not worth doing.’
‘The real thing?’
‘Normally, with a history like this, I wouldn’t even attempt it without back-up… maybe two other priests. There at least has to be what you might call a solid front. No weak links in the room. Anybody else unhappy about commitment? Mrs Foley?’
‘Well…’ Amber looked uncertain. ‘Ben and I had our marriage blessed in church. I was christened, I was even confirmed at fourteen.’
‘Fine. As the owners of this place, it would be good to have you both here, but you do need to think about where you stand, whether you have faith that this is going to make a difference.’
‘I’d agree w
ith that,’ Antony Largo said. ‘I’d say you need to think very hard indeed about where you stand. For my part, after driving all this way through the white hell, I’m no’ being fucked about any further by the only organization with ratings falling faster than anything on the box. Either I’m in the whole way or I’m outta here.’
‘That’s up to you, Antony,’ Amber said quietly.
‘Well…’ Merrily went back to her chair. ‘We’ve got an hour or two to think about it. I was thinking maybe six-thirty, for seven a.m.? So that, by the time we finish, the sun’s up. Whether we can see it or not.’
50
Free Coward
There was a white linen cloth over his face.
He lay as if he’d fallen backwards down the stairs. Very narrow and secret-looking, these stairs, Danny thought, specially by lamplight, like the steps was creeping quietly up into the bones of the building.
There was this fat black oak beam across, like a great wedge holding the walls apart. This was likely where a small door had once hung to conceal the stairs, keep the cold out. Very old house, see, Ledwardine Vicarage, and this part didn’t look to have changed much since little Tudor fellers, size of Gomer Parry, was busying up and down the steps.
Must’ve had its share of dead bodies over the centuries, and mabbe this was the way they was brought out.
Not like this, mind. God almighty, but Danny felt sick.
This one, it was like he’d been flung back by a sudden angry blast of wind, his head near enough back in the kitchen, his arms thrown out, his hands reaching the walls on either side, with scabs of dried blood on the fingers of the left one.
There was blood, too, underneath the linen towel over his face — blood and other moisture that had sucked the thin cloth around his head, so that you could see the rough form of his features. Like the mould for a death mask, Danny thought, holding the lambing lamp with both hands, realizing that he was doing this because he was shaking.
Dear God, you could only take so much of this in one night.
He was already backing off into the kitchen when he saw Gomer bending down to peel away the cloth from the dead man’s face.
‘No!’ Danny jerking the lamp away in horror, him and the bloke in the darkness of the kitchen shouting out together.
Gomer straightened up, shrugging his shoulders.
‘Police en’t gonner want you to touch nothin’, see.’ Danny felt like he was chewing cardboard.
‘And you don’t want to see that, anyway,’ Lol Robinson said. ‘Take my word for it, Gomer.’
Gomer sloped back into the kitchen, feeling for his ciggy tin.
‘Can we shut that door now?’ Lol Robinson said.
When they were both in the kitchen, he closed the door firmly on the back stairs and the body, and then he led them into another room where the first things Danny saw were the amber eyes of a black cat lying on a desk, washing itself by candlelight.
‘I’ll… make some tea, soon as the kettle boils on the stove,’ Lol Robinson said.
‘That’d be good.’ Danny had a proper look at him for the first time, taking in the glasses with one lens missing, the thin track of blood from the edge of an eye to the point of the chin. Thinking this Robinson was five or six inches shorter than the late Dexter Harris, mabbe three, four stone lighter. Thinking, how? How?
When they’d walked in, Lol Robinson had been shut away in here, on the phone to the doc, checking how this poor woman was, this Alice. Seemed no ambulance could get through on the roads and the air ambulance wasn’t allowed to land at night, snow or no snow. So the doc and the community nurse had taken this Alice to the little clinic at the surgery.
The police hadn’t got through yet, but they was on their way.
‘Them ole beams,’ Gomer said, thoughtful. ‘Harder than steel girders. Older the oak, harder it gets. Walked into one once — just walking, mind, normal pace — next thing, I’m flat out, din’t know what day it was.’ He looked at Lol Robinson. ‘That be it?’
‘He… came in like a mad bull,’ Lol said. ‘Roaring. Pitch black in there, of course. When it happened… not a sound I’m ever going to forget. You know?’
Oh hell. Danny winced. Of course. Jesus.
‘Bugger me,’ he said. ‘Muster near took his head off.’
‘Something like that.’ Lol was holding himself real funny, like there was some physical injury you couldn’t see.
‘He was comin’ for you,’ Gomer said.
Lol nodding. And but for this power cut, Danny thought… Hell, this was the only feller he ever met with reason to be grateful to the power company supplying Herefordshire.
‘Right, listen now, boy.’ Gomer lit a ciggy. ‘Piece of advice yere. I reckon what happened, you was runnin’ away from this feller.’
‘Well, that—’
‘No, listen! Any suggestion of you deliberately goin’ this way in the dark, on account of you knowin’ ’bout the beam, while he en’t been this way before… Know what I’m sayin’?’
Lol smiled faintly, shaking his head.
‘Ah… now! Don’t you bloody look at me like that, boy! You gets some clever buggers in the cops nowadays — university degrees, New Labour. Feller breaks into your house nowadays, you gotter make him a pot o’ tea, order him a minicab. Bottom line: better to be a free coward than a hero behind bars.’
‘Specially as you was wearin’ a Gomer Parry sweatshirt when you done it,’ Danny said.
Then he noticed the way that Lol’s hand was shaking, on the edge of the candlelight, as he tried to stroke the cat.
‘Bastard of a situation to be in, mind,’ Danny said. ‘Real bastard havin’ to wait here for the cops, with… him in the next room.’
‘Reckon I’d’ve covered his face up, too,’ Gomer admitted. ‘Must have a dent in his head you could prop your bike in.’
Lol Robinson laughed a lot at that, leaning back against the desk.
Wasn’t normal laughter, though, even accounting for the physical pain, and Danny didn’t reckon somehow that the dent in the head was the reason Lol had covered up the feller’s face.
It was the right thing. The primary rule, always hammered home with a couple of tragic case histories by Huw Owen in the Brecon Beacons, was this: never leave without doing something. This was more than something.
After half an hour, the lamp was sputtering, its oil level running low, the colour of even the nearest walls changing from magnolia to a dingy nicotine yellow.
And the confirmed congregation for Hattie’s Requiem stood at: Beth Pollen, Jeremy Berrows, Jane — pagan Jane, for heaven’s sake — Amber and Ben Foley and possibly Francis Bliss.
She needed one more, maybe two, specific communicants to make this work.
Bliss was initially helpful. He agreed to put a Range Rover and driver at the disposal of Beth Pollen, who’d offered to go down to St Mary’s Church to borrow the Sacrament. Just when you needed another priest, the vicar of Kington, it seemed, was away; to obtain the sacrament they’d need to disturb the verger.
But there was a limit to Bliss’s cooperation.
‘Merrily, are you like totally three sheets?’
‘No, I’m serious. It’s important.’
‘God knows, I’ve stuck me neck out a lorra times for you and, God knows, I’d do it again. And you’ve been good to me. But there are places I will not go. Not with the legendary atheism of the Ice Maiden and that bastard around with his little Handycam.’
‘He won’t be there, Frannie. Neither will Annie Howe. And if the lure of money wins out, and Ben Foley shows us the door, I’m ready to hold this service in a clearing in the woods.’
‘So I can tie her to a tree?’
‘Bloody hell, Frannie, I think she’d even be allowed out of prison to attend her granny’s funeral. Don’t you?’
‘Merrily.’ Bliss stood in front of the door to the lounge, as if she might suddenly charge it. ‘No.’
This was when Mumford came in to say there was a
call for her, at the reception desk.
It was coming up to five-fifteen a.m. when Jane found Mum sitting by candlelight in Ben’s office under the etching of Sherlock Holmes’s most despicable moment. She looked — face it — shattered. The crow’s-feet seriously in evidence, her fingers dancing unevenly on the desktop.
‘Mum, why don’t you like go upstairs and get some rest?’
‘It’s OK, I need to… meditate.’
‘It’s not going to be easy, even I can see that. She still thinks she owns this place. She isn’t going to want to leave.’
‘Sorry, who?’
‘Jeez. Hattie Chancery?’
‘Oh.’ Mum smiled strangely. Fatigue. Halfway out of it.
‘Who was the call?’
‘Lol.’
‘He’s waited up for you? You don’t realize the kind of guy you’ve got there, do you?’
‘The picture’s forming, flower.’
‘What did he want? Is he all right?’
‘In a manner of speaking.’
‘You’re not going to tell me about this, are you?’
‘Not now. But I will tell you. I will tell you everything. Bear with me, flower.’
Jane felt excluded, apprehensive, insecure. ‘There’s nothing wrong between you and Lol, is there?’
‘Absolutely not,’ Mum said. ‘Can you give me a few minutes to sort something out?’
Jane wandered away and came back quietly a couple of minutes later and didn’t go in, just stood outside the door. Expecting to overhear a phone call. Instead, listening in utter dismay to the sobbing and unable to work out whether this was relief or total despair.
The phone at reception called her away.
‘Jane?’
‘Irene! Haven’t you gone?’
‘I’m not going. I was on the Net for a couple of hours. Anyway, I decided not to go to Switzerland. It’s no problem. It means Lowri can take her mate from school and I can have pizzas instead of bloody turkey.’
‘Irene, this is—’
‘Shut up, Jane. You know who this Brigid is, don’t you?’
‘I…’
‘It’s bloody Brigid Parsons. That stuff’s from a nasty little site called veryverybadgirls.com, on which sick bastards all over the English-speaking world discuss their masochistic obsession with women who like to damage men or boys. Or kill them, in most cases. You know who Brigid Parsons is, don’t you?’
