The Cure of Souls (56 page)

In towelling robe and slippers, Merrily went down to the kitchen and put the kettle on. The phone was ringing again. She didn’t react to it.

She put out both wet and dry food for Ethel the cat. She made herself some tea. Outside, it was as sunny as it had been yesterday morning and the morning before. This would be the last day of the mini-heatwave, someone had said. More little yellow-green apples had fallen to the ochre lawn.

Merrily felt like the world was in colour and she was in black and white and grey.

She felt like a ghost.

In the scullery/office, she sat down in the usual sunbeam with her tea. The phone was still ringing. There were twenty-five messages on the answering machine, which meant that the tape was full.

Merrily unplugged the phone and forced herself to play every one.

There were calls from papers and radio stations she’d never even heard of.

There was a call from a woman, who even gave her name. Mrs Fry said Merrily was a smug, ambitious little bitch who deserved everything she had coming to her. Merrily didn’t recognize the voice.

There was a call from someone, a man, who just sniggered and hung up. It was a vaguely familiar snigger, quite possibly a church organist who had once exposed himself to her over a tombstone. Stock’s death had been announced too late for most of the papers; the sniggerer, like Mrs Fry, whoever she was, had probably been inspired by something on the radio or breakfast TV. What did it matter now?

A call from Dafydd Sion Lewis, in Pembrokeshire, began without preamble. ‘Mrs Watkins, I consider myself a liberal parent and what my son does in his own time is, for the most part, his own business. However—’

Merrily had already spoken to Dafydd Sion Lewis, awakening him at three-thirty a.m., because she didn’t want the police to call him first.

The only useful message was from DS Andy Mumford at Hereford. ‘Mrs Watkins, thought you’d want to know we found Amy Shelbone wandering near Clehonger, couple of miles from the Barnchurch estate. We’ll be talking to her properly today. And if we could see Jane again, that would be useful. Oh… we still haven’t found the knife, but we’re searching.’

There were several calls she had to make. She plugged in the phone and picked it up.

A man’s voice said, ‘Hello…’

Damn. How could that happen?

‘Is that Merrily Watkins?’

Yes, she said. The word didn’t come out. ‘Yes.’

She decided, at that moment, that whichever paper this was she would answer whatever questions were put to her and she would tell the entire truth. This would save a lot of time and in no way alter the final verdict.

‘This is Simon St John at Knight’s Frome.’

‘Oh.’

‘Yeah, I’m very sorry to bother you so early. I was going to leave a message on your machine, actually. I understand from Lol that you’ve had a stressful night, so you may not want to be involved in this. It’s just that I’ve been talking to the Boswells.’

‘Oh.’

‘And we… decided that something needed to be done.’

‘In relation to?’

‘In relation to a particular area of ground and the building on its perimeter.’

‘Pardon me,’ Merrily said, ‘but weren’t you invited to attend to this particular problem a while ago? Approximately two deaths ago, in fact.’

She waited for him to hang up, the way he’d done with Lol.

‘I can understand your bitterness,’ he said at last.

‘Wouldn’t call it that, exactly. I really admire your ability to tell people with problems exactly where they can shove them. I think it’s an enviable quality in a clergyman.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘if you do feel inclined to help, we’ll be meeting at the Hop Museum between ten and ten-thirty.’

‘Tonight?’

‘This morning. It has to be done at noon.’

‘What does?

‘Al and I agreed this seems to require a more… customized procedure. There’s a traditional Romany form of exorcism.
I believe they have a word or phrase meaning soul-retrieval, but I’m buggered if I can remember it.’

A shadow fell across the desk. She turned in her chair. Eirion stood there. ‘Oh.’ He backed away. ‘I didn’t… sorry.’

She waved to Eirion that it was OK. ‘It’s all a bit of a rush, isn’t it?’ she said to Simon St John.

‘Well, it…’ She picked up either crackle on the line or some agitation. ‘Al’s in a state. A bad way. And I suppose I’m—’

‘What time did you say?’

‘Midday.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it has to be. Al will explain. We were planning to meet as soon after ten as possible.’

‘I don’t know if I can make that.’

‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘I just… thank you for your—’

And now he did hang up.

Lol grabbed the ringing phone, hoping it was Merrily. He’d given up trying to call her at the vicarage. Last night/this morning, he’d forgotten to ask for her mobile number. He hadn’t been to bed. He was rediscovering, on the far shores of fatigue, a state of heightened consciousness produced by a cocktail of body chemicals that he suspected was only rarely mixed. It happened sometimes after a whole night in the studio. Afterwards, the hangover would be awesome, but right now he was floating on a luminous pool of awareness.

‘Good morning, Laurence,’ Frannie Bliss said briskly. ‘You’re up then. Gorra pen?’

‘Not on me.’

‘Good. Don’t get one.’ There was the unmuffled sound of main-road traffic; Bliss was clearly outside, on a mobile. ‘Some night, then, in the end, eh? Quite a few added complications to this Shelbone business, sounds like. What’s Merrily’s take on it?’

‘Haven’t spoken to her for a few hours.’

‘Never mind, not my case anyway. Let’s leave that alone; time’s short. I got in early this morning, couldn’t sleep – bloody full
moon. And I was thinking about what you were saying, about Mrs Stock. So I had another look in Stock’s computer – we brought his computer in; fascinating, all the things a computer’ll tell you about its owner. I got into his Internet files – you click on “history” and the computer very kindly tells yer all the Web sites Stock and his missus have been into the last months or so. Now, what was the general subject that
most
interested one or the other or both of them over the past few weeks?’

‘Gypsies?’

‘You’re on the ball this morning, son. Aye, there’s about ten files on the general subject of gypsies. Which I already knew about, of course – and no big mystery there because that was Mr Ash’s main interest, too. But I did begin to detect another element coming through. Either Stock or Mrs Stock was going back to the same sites, following up particular angles.
Gypsies and Death
was a popular one, gypsy death rituals and gypsy ghosts and evil spirits.’

‘The
mulo
?’

‘Exactly. The living dead. You wouldn’t want one, would you? The female version might be all right at first, but she’d start to wear yer out after a while. Couldn’t keep up, could you. Go bloody mad.’

‘Especially if you were already having problems down there.’

‘Precisely. Now – what would you do to get rid of it? Several suggestions came up on this one particular Web site – you could drive steel or iron needles into the heart of the corpse, or a hawthorn stake through one of its legs. Or you could simply… chop its head off. Isn’t that interesting?’

‘It is, isn’t it?’ Lol said soberly.

‘Course, this is corpses, and I think we can assume Mrs Stock was not one of the walking dead. But then if, as you suggest, the normally rational Gerard had come to believe his wife had been taken over by one of these things, and
if
she was making demands on him he was failing to satisfy – and
if
he’d got in an exorcist to sort her out…’

‘And if, the minute the exorcist had left the premises, Stephanie appeared to be unaffected or even…’

‘Go on.’

Perhaps even perversely stimulated by it
, Lol thought.

‘Maybe prayers focused on helping Stewart Ash didn’t quite hit the spot,’ he said. ‘But how was Merrily to know that?’

‘How indeed? Because Stock wasn’t telling the truth, was he?’

‘Why break the habit of a lifetime? You going to tell Howe about this?’

‘Not yet. Anyway, it might not have the desired effect coming from me. She’s the governor, she decides what line we take. She could tell me to leave the gypsy stuff alone, and that’s me silenced.’

‘Would she?’

‘She might. But let’s talk about the disappearance of this gypsy girl in the autumn of sixty-three and the recent murder of Stewart Ash. What’s the connecting factor between these two events?’

‘There is one?’

‘There is, my son, long as we agree you never heard it from me.’

‘Sorry,’ Lol said. ‘Who are you, again?’

‘Good boy. Listen, this is something I can’t help you with beyond what I’m about to say. Might be something or nothing. Either way, you’ll have to follow it up for yourself. Cherished reputations at stake. I didn’t go through official channels, because you leave tracks that way, but I did put in a call, first thing, to a former copper, who I won’t name, who used to be based at Bromyard and, as it happened, was one of the PCs involved in what you could describe as the less-than-intensive search for Rebekah Smith. And who, as a local man, was well aware of all the rumours about the womanizing activities of the late Mr Conrad Lake. You with me?’

‘All the way,’ Lol said.

Merrily brought some tea over to Eirion at the kitchen table.

‘How is it?’

‘Oh, you know, bit sore… stiff.’

‘Couldn’t sleep?’

‘Not really.’

‘Is there anything I can do?’

‘Well, I’m supposed to go back and have the dressing changed this afternoon.’

‘That’s not quite what I meant.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Can we talk?’

‘We can try.’ Merrily sat down.

The dressing was on his upper arm, just below the shoulder. The woman doctor in Accident and Emergency, stitching up the gash, had said the point of the blade didn’t seem to have quite penetrated to the bone. Dafydd Lewis had started saying he’d come over at once, take the boy back to Withybush Hospital at Haverfordwest, but Eirion had insisted he wanted to stay here and see this through. Besides, he assumed the police would want to talk to him again.

‘Anyway, I don’t deserve any sleep,’ he said to Merrily. ‘If we’d stayed out of it, this would never have happened.’

‘You should never say that. Perhaps something even worse might’ve happened.’

‘Personally,’ Eirion said, ‘I really can’t conceive of anything worse than what did happen. How’s Jane?’

‘Sleeping.’ She’d put Eirion in one of the bedrooms on the first floor.

‘Jane’s in a bad way about this,’ he said.

‘I know. She thinks she was guilty of rather demonizing Layla.’

It was the first thing Jane had said when Merrily and Lol had arrived at the Barnchurch:
Mum, I got her deeply, deeply wrong. We started talking, and gradually she was like really normal – like a friend, a mate… oh God!
Jane was looking like the time when, as a very small girl, she’d found a pot of raspberry jam and got it all over her face and down her front; only it wasn’t jam this time and it was even in her hair, so much of it that Merrily’d panicked and thought she must have been stabbed, too, and hadn’t bothered to tell the paramedics.
Layla
died. Mum, I watched her dying. I watched her heaving and shivering and struggling for breath… Oh, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus
…

In fact, Layla had passed away in the ambulance: multiple stab wounds, at least one believed to have penetrated a lung. It was Eirion who’d had to watch her die on the way to Casualty – the ambulance leaving as the fire engines came in.

The Barnchurch had burned to a shell. The flames had already been into the rafters when Jane and the wounded Eirion had brought Layla out.

‘The kid must have been behind that screen the whole time,’ he said now. ‘Clutching her knife. What was she doing with a
knife
?’

‘Well, I – I believe her mother, Justine, used to take a kitchen knife with her as protection when she went to a local church to hide from Amy’s father. This was the knife he ended up using on her.’

‘I couldn’t believe the… strength in her. She was like a wildcat, a puma or something. The flames behind her. That white party dress. It was terrifying – sort of elemental. I was just shaking all over, afterwards. I’m sure I’m going to see her in nightmares for the rest of my life.’

‘It’ll fade, Eirion, I promise. Erm… I know the police have asked you this, but what do you think brought it on?’

Eirion drank some tea, trying not to move his injured arm. ‘I’ve thought about it a lot more, obviously, since I talked to the police. I suppose, if you were looking for an ordinary, rational explanation, you’d have to say it was because of what Layla had been telling us. She wasn’t being particularly polite about Amy. One of the last things she said before it happened, she called Amy a monster and said perhaps it wouldn’t be a bad thing if she was put into care.’

Merrily nodded. ‘Mmm. And if we
weren’t
looking for an ordinary, rational explanation…?’

‘Well, earlier, Layla told us how the spiritualism thing had started with her stepfather, Allan, finding out about Amy’s history when he was looking for some dirt on Mr Shelbone because—’

‘It’s OK, I know about that.’

‘And then Layla got excited because she assumed
she
was doing it, that it was coming through
her
. But then, the further they went with it, the more they realized that it was actually Amy—’

‘
Amy?
’

‘Layla said Amy was this incredible natural medium. It was Amy who had… raised her mother, if you like.’ Eirion drank more tea. ‘I think Layla had the idea that if she stuck with Amy, kind of supervising her progress, then she’d see some, you know, amazing things. She said – this is all a bit creepy for me, Mrs Watkins, but she said that it seemed like Justine had been about to kind of, you know,
manifest
. Which was why they were here on the night of the full moon, because there’d been one the night Justine died.’

‘And Layla was convinced Amy was the real medium?’