Phil Rickman - The Cure of Souls

‘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?’

‘She said she’d been trying to develop her own psychic side for years, and suddenly here was this awful, repressed little girl who was a natural. She said she was quite jealous. That’s more or less what she said. Does this mean Amy could be in some way possessed?’

‘I don’t know.’ Merrily was thinking back to the intense, truncated night in her own church when an eighteenth-century penny had supposedly given her God’s spin on the problem: no demonic possession in this case, no possession by an unquiet spirit. ‘I suppose,’ she said, clutching another of those slender straws frequently offered to you by faith, ‘that mediumship and spiritual possession are separated by a degree of control. The medium consents to open herself to the spirit, knowing she can always close the door.’