The High Flyer (27 page)

VII

And Mrs. Mayfield? What happened to her?

She vanished. Well, she would, wouldn’t she? When Tucker fell she must have paused only to pick up the files from the table before slipping down the corridor, gliding into the lift and flitting away across the podium to lose herself among the rush-hour crowds streaming out of the Barbican tube station.

The police wanted to question her but she was never found. The house in Fulham turned out to be rented to an organisation with a box office number in the Cayman Isles, and she left no forwarding address. No charge card issued in the name of Elizabeth Mayfield was ever used again, and no further cheques were written on the one modest bank account which was uncovered. So swift and so complete was her disappearance that the police assumed she must have had a parallel life somewhere else in London, a trick which would have enabled her to withdraw at any time into her other identity, and despite extensive enquiries she was never traced. Her groups were questioned but had no information to offer, and no investigation proved that they had been engaged in illegal activities.

Nicholas made various entries on his computer and left the file open. “She’ll be back,” he said. “She’ll resurface in that other identity, but I’ll pick up her trail from the victims she’s bound to leave behind, and one day our paths will recross.”

I phoned a friend who specialised in criminal law to check that Mrs. Mayfield had committed no offence in the flat, but even a charge of inciting Kim to threaten me with a knife fell flat when I had to admit the threat had been a fake with no intent to cause harm. My friend thought any attempt to charge Kim with Tucker’s wounding would fail too, since the witnesses could only testify that it had been an accident. There had been no criminal intent. It was not an offence for a man to remove a knife from his kitchen, use it in a bout of play-acting and later be too mesmerised to put the knife down when the scene so suddenly exploded into violence. Besides, Kim’s mental breakdown meant that any action against him would be most unlikely to succeed.

“The truth is,” I said to Alice, after explaining the legal position, “it was Mrs. Mayfield who was responsible for the mayhem. It was she who refused to order Kim to put down the knife after he started behaving like a zonked-out zombie, and she who shoved Nicholas at Tucker and sent Tucker reeling into Kim.”

“But if no charges can be brought against her,” said Alice puzzled, “why should she embark on this total disappearance?”

I thought this was a good question and posed it to Nicholas. He thought it was a good question too.

“It makes one wonder if she was involved with a crime after all,” he said, “despite her usual habit of operating just within the law. But what was the crime, who was the victim and where did it take place?”

“Murder? Sophie? Oakshott?”

“Those are the obvious answers, but are they the right ones? Let’s see what Sophie’s inquest reveals.”

I need hardly add that thanks to Mrs. Mayfield, the files which had driven me to endanger Tucker’s life were never seen again.

VIII

The next fragment which whirled away into the dark contained my job at Curtis, Towers.

It was painfully ironic in retrospect to remember the enormous energy Kim and I had put into distancing ourselves from Sophie’s death by resorting to unprofessional behaviour. All our stupid cover-ups were exposed in the end because I could not cope with any more lying evasions. I talked to the Oakshott police. I told them everything. Bizarrely—and this was the crowning irony—they decided I was just a sweet little piece of blonde fluff who could not be blamed for suffering a hysterical reaction after uncovering a dead body in a sinister house surrounded by spooky woods; the chief inspector was very fatherly towards me and at one stage even patted my shining blonde head as I hit the Kleenex. With Kim he would have undoubtedly been as tough as nails, but Kim was still in hospital, still unfit to be questioned.

Naturally I had wondered if Kim could be faking the breakdown in order to avoid the inevitable interrogation, but Val said firmly that it would have been impossible for him to fool the experts at the Maudsley Hospital.

Sophie’s inquest turned out to be a non-starter as the coroner adjourned it until Kim proved fit to testify, but my newly acquired friends among the Oakshott police disclosed indiscreetly to me that there was no evidence of foul play. The pathologist thought the injuries were entirely consistent with the theory that Sophie had accidentally fallen as the result of turning her ankle and snapping the heel of her shoe; apparently there were impressions in the carpet near the top of the stairs which encouraged the verdict of accident.

However, even though the inquest was adjourned, the death had created a great buzz of speculation in the Oakshott community, and the local newshounds were soon sniffing around so noisily that the sound of their snuffles reached London. It would be hard to exaggerate the joy of the media when some bright young spark noticed that the interesting death at Oakshott involved the same people as the ones involved in an even more interesting stabbing at the Barbican less than twenty-four hours later. A media mass orgasm was soon afterwards achieved when it was realised that the stabbing had taken place in the presence of not just one but two clergymen, both of whom were famous in a field which the Church of England preferred to cloak in secrecy.

After that my fate was sealed, and Kim’s too. All the dinosaurs, whippets and fluffettes in the City were reading about the Square-mile lawyers who had hit the bad-time buffers at ninety miles an hour. Not even the Governor of the Bank of England could have saved our jobs after this media-fest, and the Law Society was certainly not going to bother, particularly when one of those loquacious Oakshott policemen happened to mention to some fiery newshound with a penchant for scorched earth that Kim and I had been messing up a potential crime scene.

While the
Evening Standard
was selling out after work on every London street corner, I was talking again to the City police, who by this time had conferred with their Oakshott brethren and decided to recheck all the witnesses’ statements relating to the stabbing. Obviously they must have been keen to nail Kim on some charge or other but no new evidence emerged which gave them a hope of obtaining a conviction.

I must stress that the police gave us a fair deal. It was the members of the press who washed us up. There is no crime yet called media-mauling, but all I can say is that there ought to be. No one found out about the alleged poltergeist or Sophie’s ghost, but as soon as the police began to hunt for Mrs. Mayfield there was talk of psychic healers and wild speculation about why the clergymen had been present when Tucker was stabbed. Soon everyone was thinking that Kim and I had gone berserk as the result of killing Sophie by black magic, and that the saintly Mrs. Mayfield’s heroic attempt to heal us had been interrupted by a couple of shady clerics spouting an antique form of religious nutterguff which had sent everyone fruity-loops.

To be fair I must admit that not all the media were in hock to infotainment. There was one scholarly article saying that many New Age healers were worthy people, and that some of the New Age tenets, such as concern for the environment, were both intellectually and morally respectable. But no one stood up for Christianity. The authorities at Church House, the headquarters of the Church of England, preserved an arctic silence, and to fill the vacuum the press printed some ferocious criticism which emanated from within the Church itself. Various theologians declared that the Church’s involvement with exorcism was intellectually untenable, while the religious radicals bellowed that any bishop who kept an exorcist on his staff ought to have his head examined. Lewis remarked drily that as every diocese now had an exorcist to deal with paranormal pastoral problems, the queue of bishops lining up to have their heads examined would stretch halfway down Harley Street, but I knew he was furious at the enormous distortions of the truth which were now taking place and the hostile spotlight which was being shone on St. Benet’s.

The stupid part was that I had never thought of either Nicholas or Lewis as being exorcists. I had merely seen them both as efficient, experienced professionals who were offering a high-quality pastoral care. Lewis was officially retired and so could be written off by the authorities as an elderly eccentric, but Nicholas was lambasted by his embarrassed trustees, blasted by his archdeacon and hauled before his bishop for a suitably severe reproof. The problem, I soon realised, was not that he was an exorcist; his ministry was approved by the bishop and he acted as a consultant to several other dioceses. The problem was that by failing to prevent a case going horribly wrong he had made all the disastrous publicity possible. The Church did not care at all for one of its exorcists hitting the headlines, and after the media-mauling I could quite understand why.

“How dare the press imply that Nicholas is an incompetent nutter!” growled Lewis, who was by this time crosser than ever. “What ignorant impertinence! The truth is that to work successfully in the ministry of deliverance you need to be exceptionally sane and well-integrated!”

I finally allowed my bewilderment free rein. “But surely Nicholas doesn’t believe all that exorcism stuff? I mean . . .” I attempted and failed to make the leap into an alternative world-view. “God, Lewis, he wasn’t really trying to exorcise Mrs. Mayfield, was he?”

“No,” said Lewis shortly.

“But in that case what was going on?”

“He was trying to control and expel a very dangerous woman who was using the darker mysteries of personality in a way which was deeply destructive.”

“Yes, yes, yes, but—”

“I messed things up by picking the wrong technique to assist in ejecting her. These people are often so puffed up with pride that ridicule can be an effective weapon, but I must face the unvarnished truth here and admit I underestimated the dangerous levels of tension which were present. When the ministry of deliverance goes wrong it can go very wrong indeed—which is why no one should attempt it without proper training by an expert.”

“Obviously, but I’m still at sea, I don’t understand this foreign language you talk. Is exorcism—”

“Exorcism is a tool for dealing with a certain pastoral problem which occurs in the borderland between religion and psychiatry. It’s very rarely used for treating people but it can still be helpful when treating places. Much more common is deliverance, a lesser rite, but most clergy, even clergy with healing ministries, tend to shy away from deliverance for fear of bringing their ministries into disrepute. The ministry of deliverance is very much the ugly twin sister of the attractive ministry of healing.”

“You mean it’s really just for eccentrics.”

“No, of course I don’t mean that! Do pay attention, Carter, and try to hear what I’m saying instead of just jumping to emotional conclusions as women so often do—”

(Five minutes were lost here in futile sexist jousting.)

When the discussion was finally resumed, Lewis said: “The popular view of the deliverance ministry has almost no relation to what actually goes on, but sound, respectable, unobtrusive work in this area is being done by sane, sensible, first-class priests such as Nicholas who work with doctors. If you were to read
Deliverance
, an excellent, down-to-earth modern handbook for exorcists edited by Archdeacon Michael Perry, you’d find—”

“I bet. But listen, why didn’t Nicholas exorcise Mrs. Mayfield instead of just trying to expel her?”

“You can only exorcise people who feel so oppressed that they come to you begging for help to relieve their torment—and even then exorcism may not be the correct solution. Mrs. Mayfield is without doubt an evil woman, but if she wants neither healing nor deliverance we can do nothing but keep her at bay when she makes open assaults on our ministry. The person who really needs deliverance here,” said Lewis, watching me closely, “is your husband. He needs to be delivered from the oppression arising from his connection to Mrs. Mayfield, the connection which has warped his personality and resulted in his breakdown.”

I ignored this. In embarrassment I demanded: “Are you implying Mrs. Mayfield’s the Devil?” I felt it was one thing to believe in evil forces—even a single supreme evil force—but quite another to believe that force was a person, the protagonist of so many religious horror-stories.

“Mrs. Mayfield,” said Lewis firmly at once, “is most certainly not the Devil—or, to use another metaphor for this aspect of reality—she’s certainly not the chief among the Powers of Darkness. She’s a human being made in the image of God, just as we all are, and as such she should be prayed for, but as she’s sufficiently open to the Devil to be able to do his work with ease, we’re usually too busy praying for her victims to pray for her as we should.”

I could make no sense of this statement. “Skip the religious language and tell me this: what’s wrong with her?”

“A doctor might describe her as a psychopath of the most destructive type, combining this profound personality disorder with a pathological taste for inflicting damage on those she chooses to exploit.”

“Fine. Why couldn’t you say that in the first place without resorting to religious language?”

“Because ultimately medical language has no vocabulary for talking about evil. It can only describe the symptoms.”

I retreated into a baffled silence, but it contained no hostility.

One of the reasons why I was increasingly willing to talk to Lewis, despite his tiger-thumping inclinations, was that no matter how rude I was as I struggled to expand my world-view to cover my recent experiences, he never flinched and always tried to serve up what he called “the unvarnished truth.” This was why, when I read in one of the tabloids that Mrs. Mayfield had contrived to vanish from the flat by borrowing the Eastern mystical trick of making herself invisible, I went back to him and said irritably: “I can’t figure out this paranormal stuff at all. How can I tell what’s nutterguff and what isn’t?”

Lewis was quite unfazed. Promptly he said: “Study the subject. Remember that the majority of paranormal cases have normal explanations, and try to learn the patterns formed by the cases which don’t fall into this category. And keep an open mind while maintaining a healthy scepticism.”

I liked this display of good sense. Cautiously I said: “I remember you told me earlier that being psychic isn’t the same as being spiritual.”

“Is Mrs. Mayfield knocking at heaven’s gate?” he retorted drily, and when I smiled he added: “Psychic gifts are often a handicap because they encourage pride and arrogance, and in order to get to grips with life you need to see yourself absolutely as you are, warts and all. If you can do that, then you have a good chance of discerning the kind of life God’s designed you to lead.”

I immediately decided he was huffing and puffing about a problem which any intelligent person could solve without too much trouble at the start of adult life. “Well, I know exactly who I am and what kind of life I’m supposed to be leading,” I said, “so I don’t have to go through any introspective time-wasting.”

“Sincere congratulations! So who are you? Why did you really marry that husband of yours? How have you managed to get yourself into such a tight corner that you’re dispossessed from your home and reduced to camping out with strangers? And how are you going to cope in a situation where your money and success have proved powerless to help you and where even your smart car is now just a lump of metal in a garage?”

There was a long silence before I said: “I’ll get over this. I’ll pull myself up by my bootstraps.” And when Lewis said nothing I added obstinately: “Okay, I’ve lost my bootstraps, but I’ll get another pair.” It was only when he still remained silent that I said uncertainly: “Won’t I?”

“It may not actually be bootstraps that you need.”

We sat looking at each other until at last I said: “I’m frightened about my job.”

“Frightened you’re going to lose it?”

“I know I’m going to lose it.”

“Then what’s frightening you?”

“I’m frightened I won’t mind.”

We thought about that for a while. Finally I said: “I don’t know what that implies. I feel I don’t know anything any more. In fact I feel I know less than nothing.”

“Now you’re really beginning to make progress,” said Lewis.