The Cure of Souls (59 page)

Simon’s eyes didn’t move. ‘OK, I suspect there was some similar impact on the second Mrs Conrad Lake, Adam’s mother. But she was wise enough to get out before too long.’

‘And the Hereford hookers?’

‘Sure, and the working girls of Worcester. “Come back to my kiln, my dear. Help me recapture some old memories.” ’

‘Each one of them acquiring, however briefly, the essence – the destructive essence – of Rebekah Smith. I just hope none of them ever got into his car a second time. I pray the psychological damage wasn’t permanent.’

He grimaced. ‘Depends what fucking Conrad did to them. Not much, by the end, I’d imagine. I suppose the times he couldn’t get himself fixed up, he’d potter along to the kiln and get auto-erotic over his photographs. And she’d be there for him.’

‘Like a drug.’

‘A craving, yeah. Until he died. How far you want to take this? I don’t know if it’s an infection, like the wilt, or a sporadic phenomenon. I don’t know whether it’s a wilful spirit or an imprint. Should I be poetic here? Should I say it came out of the kiln on the smoke of Rebekah’s cremation? Was it scattered with her ashes? How the hell can we know?’

‘Until you present her with a woman’s aura to enter, you probably won’t.’ She met his eyes and saw the fear behind the aggression.

‘You done this sort of thing before, Merrily?’

‘That a serious question?’

‘What I meant was, there’s nothing in the book on this one, is there? When she comes,
if
she comes, you’ll have to be fully aware of her and at the same time have a strong enough sense of your spiritual self to keep her out. At that point, you’ll be very much on your own.’

‘I do hope not,’ Merrily said.

Simon St John smiled tiredly. ‘
He
might see it as a little test for you. Just… don’t count on the parachute opening.’

Merrily looked into Simon’s light blue eyes for flecks of bullshit. Saw only the faded sorrow of experience.

C
HARLIE SAT BACK
, with his hands on his knees and his tea going as cold as anything could in this weather. His smile was constant and condescending. Although he wasn’t looking directly at Lol most of the time, Lol felt under intense study.

‘If this is poker,’ Charlie said at last, ‘you better show me some cards, boy.’

‘Ron Welfare?’ Hesitantly, Lol brought out the only name he’d been given by Frannie Bliss. ‘PC Ronald Welfare. He’d have been one of your old colleagues?’

‘Dead,’ Charlie said, with contempt.

‘Ron Welfare talked to a bloke who saw a woman closely resembling Rebekah Smith going over to the kiln and the door opening and a man closely resembling Conrad Lake standing there in the light, before the woman was admitted.’

Charlie made no comment.

‘There were probably other witnesses, but most of them would have had some family members still employed by Lake. This was a chap from outside the area who’d gone to visit his mother nearby.’

‘How’re you, Terry?’ Charlie called out to a man leaving the coffee shop. ‘Don’t forget to get that application in before September, now.’

Lol pressed on. He realized no ordinary former copper would even be talking to him by now, but Charlie Howe was a
prominent local councillor, a friend to the people, an open book. And maybe his ward was a marginal. And also they were in a public place. And you couldn’t tell whether Charlie was worried now, or just curious.

‘Ron Welfare was so convinced he was on to something that he even worked on it in his spare time,’ Lol said. ‘But no police were going to risk grilling Lake, because he was the Emperor of Frome and he owned half the valley, and Rebekah Smith was considered the lowest of the low.’

‘Could be you’re a journalist,’ Charlie said thoughtfully. ‘But I don’t think so. You don’t talk like a journalist.’

‘When Ron eventually reported it to his superiors, a detective was assigned to check it out. By this time, Ron had put some more stuff together – reports of the kiln furnace being fired for two days or more, even though the hop season was well over.’

‘Not unusual,’ Charlie said. ‘Furnaces can be used for more than drying hops. You don’t talk like somebody works for some gypsy-loving civil-liberties charity, either.’

‘Did you never have the furnace checked out for…’ Lol struggled to keep the ignorance out of his eyes. ‘I don’t know – fragments of bone or whatever? Were there
any
forensic tests?’

‘No need, boy. Waste of resources, would’ve been. Seeing as the hunt was called off that very night. Now, I wonder if you’re simply someone with a grudge against the Lake family.’

‘The witness didn’t stand by his story, in the end. Suddenly he said he couldn’t be sure. Or maybe somebody made it worth his while to drop it?’

‘Or perhaps it’s me you’re after. Perhaps you or some mate of yours is trying for the council. But that don’t make a whole lot of sense. You wouldn’t come and face me up with some half-arsed story – less you got a little cassette recorder on you. But you en’t even wearing a jacket. No.’ Charlie leaned back. ‘It’s a puzzle. But, for the record, that girl probably left home, like a lot of young gypos did, sick of a life of squalor and ducking and diving. And the gypos, never ones to miss an opportunity, made out she was missing, presumed dead, to get back at Brother
Lake for kicking them off his land. Whole bunch of ’em should’ve been charged with wasting police time. Rebekah Smith, she’s probably a suburban granny now, keeping very quiet about her origins.’

‘But Ron Welfare never forgot. And he never did make CID. His career kind of… stopped right there. For some reason.’

‘Ron Welfare left the force years back. Ron Welfare was a second-rate copper and a sick and bitter man.’

‘However,’ Lol said, ‘the DC who went with him to question Lake – he did really
well
. He was a sergeant by the end of the year and he never looked back at all, did he?’

The condescending smile was history. ‘Well, now.’ Charlie leaned forward, his face close up to Lol’s, eyes like knuckle-bones. ‘You wouldn’t, by any chance, be suggesting this detective was corrupt, would you, Brother?’

Point of no return. Lol wondered briefly if he hadn’t been set up by Bliss, no fan of Annie Howe, to stir an old pot. He made himself meet Charlie Howe’s bruising gaze.

‘Lake was a very powerful figure locally. Influential.’

‘So Conrad was buying off witnesses and bribing policemen to look the other way?’

‘Isn’t that how it was in those days? A strong squirearchy, and senior policemen
expected
to be in the Masons?’

‘I’ll ask you once again, boy, are you suggesting this particular detective was bent?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Because another alternative about you that occurs to me would be attempted blackmail. Of course, only a very stupid person would attempt to blackmail an ex-policeman. But then small-time blackmailers often
are
very stupid people.’

Lol shook his head.

‘And shy,’ Charlie Howe said. ‘They’re often a bit shy. And hesitant – bit timid. See, a real criminal, he’d go and hold up a bloody garage, but your small-time blackmailer, he en’t got the bottle. He’s quite often someone on the small side of average, maybe unsuccessful in his career – a misfit, a social inadequate
with a personality defect. Would that be you, Brother Robinson?’ Charlie sneered. ‘Aye, that could
very well
be you.’

Two elderly ladies brought their trays to the next table, and Charlie broke off to smile pleasantly at them, raise a hand. ‘So piss off, boy,’ he muttered out of the side of his mouth. ‘Take your forty-year-old, cobbled-together nonsense somewhere else, and don’t try and play with the pros.’

Lol’s hands were gripping the sides of his chair and for about half a second he seemed to be looking down on himself and the white-haired man with the leathery face, that condescending smile returning to it.

‘Right, you’ve done it now, Brother Howe.’ Surprised at how calm he sounded. ‘I’m going to tell you exactly why I’m here… just so you’ll know that it’s nothing to do with money – absolutely the reverse, in fact – and there’s nothing you can ever do to scare me off.’

Charlie Howe blinked, just once. It was the first time Lol had noticed him do that.

‘And also why,’ he went on, ‘if I ever find out you
did
take money or favours or even benefit from a word from the Emperor of Frome in the right chief superintendent’s ear – or that your old mate Andy Mumford slipped you some pictures and a manuscript he took off the Smith brothers when he nicked them for murder – if I find out any of that I’m going to hang you up to dry so high that, from where you are, I really will look very, very small.’

The old ladies were looking across. Charlie Howe smiled and it was not, Lol noticed, with immense relief, an entirely comfortable smile.

‘My place next, I think, Mr Robinson,’ he said.

At 10.45 precisely, Merrily and Simon St John drove over to Prof Levin’s studio, left the Volvo on the back forecourt and walked down the track through the meadow. The hay lay like stilled waves either side of a causeway. There were still traces of heat haze over the Malverns. Merrily saw the Frome Valley as
an airless, spectral netherland where the real and the unreal wrestled in an amorphous tangle of threshing limbs.

She was afraid.

Not yet eleven on a wonderful summer morning, the kind of morning that dissolved fatigue, the kind of morning from which the uncanny was banished, but she was afraid. Her stomach felt weak; her throat was dry and sore.
Walk away
, Huw had said.
No shame
.

This would probably be her last Deliverance job. Bit of an occasion? In the museum, she’d put on her light grey cotton alb and a large pectoral cross, for the aura.

‘A holy cross
is
supposed to condition it, isn’t it? The aura?’

‘So I believe,’ Simon said. ‘Just as ordination does. And regular prayer, the celebration of the Eucharist – all protective.’

Simon smiled in a half-hearted way, felt in a hip pocket of his jeans and brought out a heavy gold cross on a chain, slipped it over his head.

‘What about Al?’ Merrily said.

‘I doubt it.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Al won’t be looking for protection.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because gypsies believe in destiny, and Al believes this is his.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Oh, I think you do, Merrily.’

They’d arrived at the bridge over the Frome. She stopped and stared down into the dark water of Lol’s river. She supposed she’d known since last night.

‘It’s the unspoken, isn’t it? The first Mrs Lake.’

‘There you are, then.’

‘Does
everyone
know?’

‘Not quite everyone. But the Frome Valley people are rather like the Frome itself. Secretive. Protective.’

‘Sally?’

‘Is her actual first name. Sarah Caroline Lake. She was very young when she married him, of course. It wasn’t exactly an
arranged marriage but fairly close. Her father was a wealthy enough guy, but nothing compared with the Great Lakes. When she went off with Al, it’s hard to know which family was more appalled.’ Simon unsnagged a hanging twig from the chain of his cross. ‘At the divorce, she took only a small settlement – far smaller than someone in her position would expect today – and distributed it among a number of charities, considering this the only way of laundering, in the old-fashioned sense, Conrad’s tainted money.’

‘And when Conrad died…’

‘She and Al were able to return.’

‘She’s the Lady of the Bines.’ The thought made Merrily absurdly happy. ‘She wrote her own story and gave it to a ghost.’

‘Rather lovely, I always thought,’ Simon said.

‘It crossed my mind, of course it did. Al virtually told us.’

‘And now you can forget it, just like the rest of us have.’

‘Well… sure.’ They followed the path towards the line of poplars, and her flare of happiness faded. ‘But going back to Al’s destiny…’

‘Think about it,’ Simon said.

‘I have. The gypsies genuinely believed Lake took Rebekah because his own wife had gone off with a Romany.’

‘Some of them still believe it,’ Simon said sombrely. ‘And, after all, it may be true. It’s certainly why Al’s father never spoke to him again – while alive. Why Al became an outcast. A pariah. Cursed.’

Al’s profile in the glow of candles in bottles.
You want to know the truth of it, I’m still paying back
.

‘He seriously believes he’s cursed?’

‘Don’t underestimate the weight of that tradition, Merrily. He seriously
knows
he’s cursed.’

Charlie Howe’s high-ceilinged, white-walled sitting room was more than half office: a roll-top desk, a crowded flat-top desk, a wooden filing cabinet, a bookcase full of box files and a computer. There was also a TV set, with satellite box, and a black-leather
recliner placed in front of the screen.

Right now, Charlie didn’t seem in the mood for reclining. He sat on the deep window sill.

‘The Reverend Merrily Watkins,’ he said. ‘My latest weak spot. You bastard, Brother Robinson. Are you two—?’

Lol shook his head.

‘But you live in hope, I imagine. Were you there last night, by any chance, when this Shelbone child…?’

Lol nodded.

‘Can’t beat that for bitter irony, can you? Allan Henry gets his biggest wish in all the world: the bloody Barnchurch burns down – at a cost. And
what
a cost. What’s he gonner do now? Will he build on the very spot where his stepdaughter died?’

‘My guess,’ Lol said, ‘would be a Layla Riddock memorial plaque on a side wall of Debenhams.’

Charlie Howe laughed and pointed at him, one eye closed. ‘Dead right, Brother! By God, you must be
very
fond of Mrs Watkins. Last time anybody threatened me like that in public, he – but then, I must watch my tongue in front of you, mustn’t I? You really
were
going to try and blackmail me, weren’t you?’

‘Persuade you.’

‘Good word. Often used it myself. Persuade me to do what?’

‘Just to get your daughter off Merrily’s back. She’s trying really hard to make sense out of an impossible job, and your daughter’s going to turn her into a demon or a martyr. And the Church of England doesn’t like either, so we all know what that means.’