The Cure of Souls (42 page)

The barb really taking hold when Amy went home and asked Hazel Shelbone certain questions – saw the instant dramatic effect on Hazel. Immediately, Amy would feel herself to be at the centre of this awful conspiracy – her beloved adoptive parents had been lying to her for all these years. The only person who wasn’t lying to her was her real mother, reaching out from beyond the grave. Layla, with her sense of drama, could create whatever kind of Justine she needed for the purpose: lonely, sad, unloved, imploring.

And horribly seductive to an adolescent who perhaps
did
sometimes feel like an alien – without previously having known why.
Had
something previously hidden been unblocked, horrific memories awoken?

‘So gradually Layla was feeding it out to Amy: blood in the church, blood on the altar. Then here’s Dennis Beckett in his vestments, with his chalice: “The blood which he shed for you… The blood of Christ keep you in eternal life.” And Amy Shelbone, kneeling in the chancel, is getting a whole different slant on this.’

All smelly and musty and horrible, and it’s full of dead people
… There must have been some ghastly images in her head by then – Wayne Jukes, maddened with pain and shock, half his face hanging off, plunging the kitchen knife into Justine. And ‘eternal life’ was some church-bound, tortured spirit.

‘The big lie, the great cover-up.’ Merrily was rocking in the passenger seat, everything suddenly making blinding sense.
He watches us suffer and die and he doesn’t help us, ever, ever, ever… Nobody’s going to ever save you. It’s all a horrible sick lie!
‘Amy only knows one church, one altar. She’s imagining her mother dead…
in Dilwyn Church
.’

She stopped, hearing what else Amy had screamed from her room:
And I don’t… I don’t want to die in
… Had ‘Justine’ predicted that Amy too was going to be killed or at least die in church? Had she given some kind of terrible warning that made suicide seem like a soft option?

‘The essence of all this,’ Sophie said, ‘is that the child has been virtually programmed to turn against everything the
Shelbones cling on to. If that’s true, then, in its insidious way, it’s actually extremely sophisticated. Almost Satanic in its… Do you know what I mean?’

‘In the way the poison’s been introduced.’

‘However, I don’t even see that any laws have been broken. And I
still
don’t think you should get out of this car.’

‘You bastards.’ Kirsty Ryan lay flat in the churned hay, staring up at the deepening blue. ‘I don’t know whether you’re lying to me, or what. It don’t matter either way to me, though, look, ’cause I en’t catching no armful of shit for that bitch, I can tell you that much.’

‘Why don’t you just tell us everything?’ Eirion suggested.

Kirsty rolled her spiky head back into the hay. ‘Who
is
this guy thinks he’s Geoffrey Paxman?’

‘Just a friend,’ Jane explained.

‘Thanks, Jane,’ Eirion said.

‘Well, all right, a really good friend,’ Jane conceded.

Kirsty grinned. ‘Then why’n’t you both just go and have a roll behind that hedge and leave me alone, eh?’

‘Please, Kirsty.’ Jane leaned over her. ‘This is really important.’

Kirsty sat up. ‘All right. Siddown. Got any blow? Naw, forget it. Only kidding. Wouldn’t do at the vicarage, would it? Listen, I’ll go so far and no further, so don’t go asking me more stuff when I say
no
. And you keep me out of this, right? Else I’ll come after you with the four-ten.’

‘OK.’ Jane sat down in the mown grass. Kirsty with a shotgun – that was entirely believable. ‘We never even spoke to you.’

‘This thing, it got out of hand, right? I went so far with it then I was out. Finished. I even tried to bust it all up, but that didn’t work. So that was it, I was outer there. Plus, I mean, in school you need diversions, right? You gotter have things to get you through it. Though I don’t need that now, do I? I look like I got time to mess with the mind of some stupid little cow?’

‘No,’ Jane said.

‘All right, well, it’s simple enough. Layla knew some things about Shelbone, look – about her parents, her
real
parents.’

‘How did she—?’ Eirion began, but Jane put a warning hand on his knee and he shut up.

‘Like, for instance, that her dad knifed her ma to death in this church,’ Kirsty said.

Jane clutched at the hay.

‘Both of them bloody junkies. Both parents junkies and her dad’s a murderer – and Shelbone’s this holier-than-thou, pain-in-the-arse, stuck-up little cow who’d grass you up to the teachers soon as—Unbelievable, ennit?’

‘Where did this happen?’ Eirion asked.

‘Somewhere up the Midlands? Not round yere.’

‘In a church?’ Jane felt numb.

‘Now Layla, she had a very good reason to bring down that family. On account it was Shelbone’s ol’ man, her
adopted
ol’ man that messed it up when Layla done that gypsy thing at the Christmas Fair.’

‘I wasn’t there. I was sick.’

‘Well, I’ll tell you, Jane, that was real scary, that stuff she was coming out with. When she gets in that gypsy gear, it’s like she’s another person. Wouldn’t have
my
fortune told by her,
no
way. But that’s beside the point. The point is ol’ man Shelbone protests that it’s unChristian and he gets it stopped. So in Layla’s view they all got it coming to them now, big-time. Gypsies don’t forget, right? And she done me a few favours, mostly money, you know? So I couldn’t say no.’

‘To helping her stage the ouija?’

‘But, after a while, I could tell this was fucking the kid up, serious.’

Merrily gazed over the glass waterfall that was Allan Henry’s home. She thought about getting out, going for a meditative walk around, with a cigarette. Perhaps there was something obvious she was missing.

‘Where’s her mother stand in all this?’ she asked suddenly.

‘Sandra Henry,’ Sophie said. ‘Sandra Riddock?’

‘You
know
her?’

‘Not personally, but she worked for an estate agency where my sister was manager for a while. It was how she met Henry. They were the agents for one of his first shoddy housing estates – twelve, fifteen years ago? She was quite a beauty, apparently. I remember my sister saying that no one knew she even had a child, then.’

‘The father was a gypsy, Jane says.’

‘I wouldn’t know. But you’re right – I do wonder if Sandra Henry knows what her daughter’s been up to.’

‘I wonder if she’s in. I wonder if she’s down there now – on her own. I wonder if Layla’s away, supposedly staying with friends or something equally suspicious.’

Sophie stiffened. ‘On what basis would we be calling on her?’

‘We? Well, me, I’d have to play it straight. I’m a minister of the Church. I’ve just found out my daughter’s been involved in experiments to contact the dead, along with Mrs Henry’s daughter and a girl who attempted suicide. As a priest I’m naturally very worried about that. What’s she going to do, laugh it off, turn me away?’

‘You’d be using Jane.’

‘I’m not
using
Jane. Jane didn’t even tell me about it. Dennis did.’

‘All right.’ Sophie started the car. ‘Let’s try and find the entrance to the drive. I’m told it isn’t obvious. I won’t say “On your head be it.” It’s both our heads.’

‘You’re a mate, Soph.’

‘Oh, shut up.’ Sophie pulled into the lane, drove very slowly down the hill. It was very quiet; there were no other houses or farms in the vicinity. No cows or sheep grazed the hill. As far as Merrily could recall, no other vehicle had passed them since they’d stopped.

‘Likes his privacy.’

‘Evidently.’ Sophie stopped opposite a tarmacked opening on the right. ‘You think this is it?’

‘Try it.’

Sophie drove into the entrance – the deep shade of big forest trees immediately closing over the car. After about fifty yards they came to the perimeter wall with its railings on top, a couple of brick gateposts, eight or so feet high, with metal gates, open. A black sign on the left-hand post decreed, in yellow lettering, NO UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY.

‘Probably be security cameras, somewhere,’ Sophie guessed. They passed a small bungalow with a van outside. ‘Staff there, I expect. We supposed to check in, I wonder?’

‘Nobody about, anyway. Carry on.’

On the left was a clearing in the trees. Sophie braked.

‘Good heavens. Either it’s a reproduction or a museum piece.’

‘Or Layla’s dad’s dropped in.’

The
vardo
stood alone. It was crimson and gold, like an outsize barrel organ. It had ornate, gilt-ribbed panels, a porch with side-brackets like golden wheels, and brass carriage lamps. The windows had intricately patterned shutters. The
vardo
looked immaculate, out of a children’s picture book.

Really
has
thrown money at her, Merrily thought. For a couple of seconds she even wondered if Amy Shelbone was in there with Gypsy Layla.

‘Too easy,’ Sophie murmured, and drove on.

After a few yards, the full sky reappeared as the drive widened into a forecourt with three vehicles in it: a Range Rover, a black Porsche Carrera and a small sleek yellow sports car. There was a flight of about five stone steps up to a front door that was about the size and thickness of the one accessing Ledwardine Church.

A man came down the steps. Merrily got out of the car.

‘I’m looking for Mrs Henry.’

‘
Are
you, indeed?’ He wore jeans and an old cheesecloth shirt, open to the waist. Gardener? Handyman? Security?

‘This is the right house, isn’t it?’ Merrily said.

‘And you are?’

‘My name’s Merrily Watkins.’

He nodded slowly, waiting.

‘I just wanted to talk to Mrs Henry on a private matter. I would’ve rung first, but it’s ex-directory.’

‘So it is,’ he said. ‘Well, she’s not here.’ He looked her up and down like she might have a set of burglar’s tools under her jacket. ‘Maybe I can help.’ He put out a slow hand. ‘Allan Henry.’

Kirsty Ryan said she’d first started to get cold feet when she realized that Amy Shelbone had actually
not
known about her real dad killing her mother until they pulled the spirit scam on her in Steve’s shed.

‘Even Layla was surprised how easy she went for it. We’d give her a bit of a spirit message from her ma, and she’d write it all down, like it was tablets of stone, and next day, half-twelve on the dot she’d come scampering across the field, desperate to contact her ol’ lady again – I’m saying ol’ lady, she was just a kid herself when the bastard carved her up. I was getting pissed off with it. I mean, a joke’s a joke, but you don’t let it take over your life.’

‘Whose life?’ Eirion asked.

‘
She
needed it as much as the kid by then.’

‘Layla?’

‘Don’t get the idea she’s playing at this, mate.’ Kirsty pushed a hand through her foxy hair. ‘She’s into the gypsy thing in a
big
way. Whole shelves of books, wardrobes full of exotic clobber – the veils and the hats and the flouncy skirts. She got crystals and a dozen packs of Tarot cards. She got her own gypsy caravan. She mixes herbs and things. She’ll do you a love token to get the bloke you want – involving locks of your hair and his hair and ribbons and stuff. Calls herself a
shuvani
, a gypsy sorcerer. Like – OK – once, there was this bloke I fancied and I wanted to know if I was wasting my time, right? Layla’s like, OK, wait for the right time of the month, gimme a Tampax—’

Jane recoiled. ‘Gross!’

‘We make this necklace of beads out of clay and menstrual blood. I was supposed to hang it on the guy’s locker and then if the beads had like dissolved by morning it meant he wasn’t gonner be interested. In the end, I bottled out, threw it away, said somebody must’ve nicked it. I mean – what?’

‘She really believes this stuff?’ Eirion said.

‘It’s her
life
, mate.’

‘So she didn’t think it was entirely a scam – the spiritualism?’

‘It started
out
that way, like I said. But when it began to
work
, when the kid’s really gone for it, she’s like, “Oh this is how it happens, this is how it happens.” You know?’

‘Not really.’

‘It was like she believed the kid’s ma really was in touch. Now, she believes she’s got the power. All the things she told people at the Christmas Fair, ever since, she’s been like, “Oh, Mrs So-and-So just died, you hear that? I told her she was gonner die!” Going on like that.’

Jane shivered.

‘They’re really cooking, you know, her and the kid. I don’t know how she found out about the murder, I really don’t. But then she reckons a load of other stuff’s coming through that she
didn’t
know. Layla is very excited, not that you’d know that, if you en’t known her as long as me. Come the holidays, no way does she wanner let go of little Shelbone. That afternoon, after the heavy mob crash into Stevie’s shed and bust us up, I’m like, right, that’s it, you can count
me
out, sister, I got better things to do. But she’s already making other arrangements.’

‘So you haven’t been in contact with Layla since school broke up?’ Jane said.

‘She rang me a couple of times. I said I was too busy? Next thing, I hear about the kid chucking up in church – well, nobody knew what that was about except me. I thought, this has gone too far. This is well over the bloody top.
Next
thing I hear, she’s tried to do away with herself. That’s spooky, ennit?’ Kirsty stood up. ‘There it is. You got the lot now.’

Eirion said, ‘You’ve known Layla a long time then?’

‘All my life, give or take. We were at the same little school at Eardisley. Course, they weren’t rich then, her and her ma. When Allan Henry come on the scene, he wanted to take her away from Moorfield to some private school, but she wouldn’t go.’

‘You never met her father?’

‘
She
never met her father. She used to have like fantasies about him, this mysterious gypsy. He was probably some travelling scrap-metal dealer, but she had him roaming Europe in his romantic caravan, seducing women with love potions and doing the business.’