Soul Seeker (33 page)

He fished in his wallet and produced five ten-pound notes, leaving them under the desk blotter for Clive as a tip. They walked out of the mortuary together having called out goodbye. Outside the rain was warm but relentless. He asked her, ‘Do you think he's right? Sheldon killed the boys because they stumbled across the drugs operation?'

She made a face. ‘It's plausible, but there's something not quite right about it.'

‘Since when has a perfect fit been needed to convict a criminal?'

‘Unfortunately, that's very true. There's always doubt, one way or the other. The only question is, how much doubt should we allow?'

‘You think there's too much in this case?'

But she didn't know what she felt and turned the question around. ‘What about you? Are you happy to convict Sheldon?'

He laughed. ‘I'm only a pathologist, Beverley. That's outside my remit.'

‘But not outside your experience. You've been involved in enough investigations to have a view.'

‘Maybe.' He paused to consider, gather his thoughts. They were walking in the rain back to their cars. Suddenly he said, ‘Look, I'm dog tired and so are you. Give me a few hours to sleep and think it through, then I'll tell you what I think tomorrow. OK?'

‘Of course.' They had reached the cars. ‘We'll talk in the morning.' She smiled at him; it was a smile that he had not seen before, one that was almost shy. He wondered what it meant.

There had been perhaps ten seconds of silence, which is a long time when it is deep in the night, and there is rain outside and the room is cold. Pilcher suddenly stood up and came around the table, pulling out a chair so that he could sit directly beside Lancefield. He said, ‘You know what I'm talking about, don't you. You understand.' These were assertions. She nodded, tears in her eyes, but said – could say – nothing. ‘Come here, child,' he commanded, his voice soft and overfilled with compassion. He took her hands in his, enfolded them, as if making them disappear by a conjuror's illusion. ‘Tell me.'

And she confessed. She told him how she and her father had sat with her mother for hours and how she had gradually subsided, and how she thought that her mother was going to slip unseen away, as if sneaking from the room. ‘My father had fallen asleep and I was close to it; I felt so tired, but I couldn't allow myself to miss her passing. I just couldn't.'

She looked into the face of the priest and he nodded and there were tears in his eyes, as there were in hers. ‘Of course you couldn't,' he agreed.

‘She had been deteriorating for years, and I had looked on that as dying, as a passage away from us, from her body, from life, but now . . . now I don't know.'

‘What happened?'

‘After so many long hours of just lying there, eyes closed, mouth open and chest barely moving, her eyes suddenly opened. For some seconds, she just stared up towards the ceiling, and then I said softly, “Mum”. I thought she wasn't going to respond, but quite suddenly, she turned her head to look at me. I reached for her hand, took it, and was immediately aware that it didn't feel right.'

‘How so?' he asked at once.

But she couldn't put it into words. ‘I don't know. It was just different.'

He frowned, considered, then sighed slightly. ‘Go on.'

‘My mother's eyes were at first unfocussed, but then she seemed to see me. I was going to speak, but then, for the first time for years, she smiled and with that, her eyes lost focus and I
felt
something.'

‘What?' he demanded, but again she had trouble continuing and he had to prompt her. ‘Was it as if something were passing through you?'

‘Yes,' she said but it was a hesitant affirmation. ‘I suppose it could have been.'

‘You felt it too, Rebecca. You are truly blessed.' And the tears rolled down his face.

FIFTY-NINE

E
isenmenger tried to sleep but there was too much going on in his head for that. He had showered and was now back at the table, pad of paper in front of him, scribbling his thoughts as they came to him. He had a familiar feeling, one that suggested to him that he was seeing a way through the maze. He was so far behind with his work at the hospital that tomorrow he would have to spend the morning in his office, eyes stuck to the microscope. Then he would meet Beverley and take her through his thoughts.

Right at the back of his mind, beneath the part that was excitedly analysing the facts of the killings of the two boys, there was a faint wisp of a different kind of excitement, but he was too preoccupied to consider it deeply.

At Lancefield's bidding, Pilcher resumed his story. ‘I sought advice from the chaplain at school; a repressed homosexual, perhaps even a repressed paedophile, although he never made advances towards me. He was a sorry looking man, perpetually morose and subject to chronic dandruff. He was of no use, of course. He thought I was either making it up or had just dreamed it, but I knew that I had not. I had been placed with foster parents and they were kindly enough, although ineffectual, and unable to view me as anything other than a casualty, something to be cosseted, forever wrapped in childhood softness. They had something of a shock, I think, when I insisted on carrying on my hunting pursuits; certainly they did not accept my gifts of pheasants, rabbits and even the odd small dear.' Pilcher grimaced. It had grown very cold in the house, but Lancefield did not care. She did not take her eyes from his face, nor her ears from his tale.

‘It became something of an obsession of mine to try to recapture that moment, snaring an animal, and then looking into its eyes, coming as close as I could to it, as it died. Yet, there was never that
frisson
; I was watching an animal die, nothing more; could it be, then, that I was looking in the wrong place? Perhaps I saw nothing because there was nothing to see. In being with an animal when it died, perhaps I was wasting my time. After all, what was I exactly looking for? What had I experienced as I held my father and as his life left him?

‘Despite the pusillanimous responses of my chaplain, it became obvious to me that it was his soul that I had experienced, that it had passed through me. I tried to explain this to my teachers, but they at best patronized me, at worst scoffed; I was a child and therefore, in their eyes, incapable of any fundamental observation, worthy only of childish delusions. I had tried to recreate the experience but had failed; I had nothing but my memory.

‘That I drifted into the Church was more from pragmatic and academic reasons than pastoral ones. Where better to examine this thing that man has spent thousands of years talking about yet never seeing? How better to access the finest minds on the subject? Did I believe in the existence of God? I believed in the existence of the soul; I believed that the soul differentiates us from the animals and that it is because of it that we have self-awareness. So, yes, I supposed that I did. Yet my God has never been that of so many Christians, an idealized version of a father, one who is so comforting because he is always willing to forgive, one who beams down on us from on high, a twinkle in the eye, a softly playing smile around the lips.' He snorted in disgust. ‘Those fools should look around them and see the universe in which they live.'

In a voice that was hoarse, Lancefield said, ‘But you must believe in kindness and charity . . . in caring.'

He frowned. ‘Of course I do. But do not for one moment believe that such things come from God. They come from us, no one else. How can a God with a universe to consider, have any regard for things as lowly as we?'

‘But the soul goes to heaven, doesn't it?' She sounded in her own ears to be scared of his answer.

‘Of course. This existence is merely a temporary thing. True life comes after this.'

She nodded, relieved. ‘Good.'

He seemed slightly troubled, as if her interruption had broken his line of thinking. Only slowly did he begin to speak again. ‘Over the years I became something of an expert in writings on the soul, on what the “experts” had to say, which was precious little. Of more interest to me was the chance it gave me to be present when death arose from life. Those were the times that I craved, that made my own soul sing, yet time after time came and never once did I feel as I had felt on that one time when my father had passed away. Gradually, my passion faded. I concluded it must have been a fluke, or maybe my school chaplain had been right and I had deluded myself. I settled into the life of priest and would be there now if circumstances had not conspired to reawaken my desires.

‘I was the incumbent of St Mark's in Gloucester. It is not a particularly attractive church, nor an attractive area, or even an attractive congregation. It was at this time that I married. Did I love my wife? I have asked that of myself many times, and still do not, perhaps cannot, find the answer. I have not been taught to love as most are; I knew that there was something missing and was unable to repair the fault. All the same, Linda was happy, I am sure. She died, though, as I knew she would, for she had myeloma when I met her.'

Which brought Lancefield up with a start. ‘You knew when you married her?'

He said simply, ‘Yes.' There was no inflection in his voice, no surprise that she should ask, no shame at what he had done. ‘She was lonely and she fell in love with me. I showed her affection and attention and love; few people had shown her those things in her life before. She was dying and I made the last few years of her life as comfortable and love-filled as I could.'

‘And you got to see her die,' guessed Lancefield.

Pilcher did not react other than to explain, ‘I think that if I had not succeeded, I would have given up.'

‘It happened again? You experienced the passing of the soul?'

He took a while before he nodded. ‘On that final morning, I held her and we talked for long hours. She was very ill by then. The cancer had caused her to become bloated and she was prone to haemorrhage. She was drowsy, and accumulating fluid in her face and limbs. Yet, at the moment of her death, I was again the conduit, it seemed, for something, and my faith was renewed. I knew that I had not imagined or confabulated the events of my father's death. There is a soul in each of us and it is a distinct entity.'

‘You decided to search for it,' guessed Lancefield.

‘Linda had left me a not inconsiderable legacy; it seemed only fitting that I should use it to try to define the soul. I knew that if I were to hope to persuade a sceptical world, I would have to adopt the methods of that world. I had studied the scientific method as part of my theological training, so I had a good idea where to start.'

‘Where did you get the money?'

‘Linda left it to me. She was a rich woman.' Lancefield was policewoman enough to wonder just how tangled his motives had been for marrying the poor woman, but she said nothing about this. Instead she said, ‘And so you killed all those people. They were from your Alcoholics Anonymous group, weren't they? No official records and therefore nothing to trace them with.'

Without any emotion – no shame, no pride, no satisfaction, as if it all meant absolutely nothing to him, he nodded and said, ‘Yes.'

‘But the pain you caused, the suffering of those poor people.'

He reacted suddenly. ‘People, yes! But not to their souls, not the God-given part of them. They are safe, in the afterlife; they are where they belong. I have merely released them from the captivity of an incarnate, imperfect prison.' He was suddenly animated and Lancefield was slightly afraid. She found herself wondering what she had been thinking, to come here, to think to find someone whom she understood, whose motives were known to her yet completely unknowable to the likes of Beverley Wharton and the oh-so-clever Dr Eisenmenger. He was no longer talking to her, but to someone, or something else; his own personal daemon, perhaps, or his own personal God. ‘I am trying to find something that mankind has sought for thousands of years, something that could prove the existence of an afterlife. Think of it, Rebecca. The knowledge that there is an eternal, immortal soul in each and every one of us. The pleasure and relief that would bring to billions. Is not a small amount of pain for a few sorry individuals worth that?'

‘But what you did to Malcolm Willoughby . . .'

‘Was worth it.' This was deadpan, both in his voice and his face. ‘I know that he is in the afterlife and he is happy.'

She began to think that maybe it would be a mistake to argue with him, to wonder if she were entirely safe. He was still sitting in the chair facing her, and the rain was still falling outside and it was still cold and dark in that house, and suddenly everything was scaring her. She tried to soothe him, hoping to reconnect with him, for she now saw that he was no longer looking at her as, quite literally, a soul mate. ‘You've had some success, too.'

He seemed to change slightly at this. ‘Yes. Just a hint, but I think that there was something. You saw it?' She nodded and hoped it wasn't too enthusiastic and counterfeit. He seemed pleased. ‘It shows I am on to something. It is worth continuing, I'm convinced.'

SIXTY

A
ntonia could not sleep properly, despite the pills and potions Andrew had insisted on giving her. Believing that she was thinking clearly, she eventually could lie in her bed no longer; moving slowly and cautiously so as not to wake her husband, she got up, put on the dressing gown that lay on the end of the bed, and crept from their bedroom. She went to Josh's room as if drawn and, once there, she just sat on the end of his bed and looked around, immersed in memories, tears boiling within her.