Phil Rickman - The Cure of Souls

‘Newspaper, no,’ Lol said. ‘Memoirs, probably.’

‘Cost you, boy.’

‘Bought you a doughnut.’

Charlie smiled. ‘That gets you as far as 1960. Nothing much happened that year, I was still a beat copper.’

‘How about sixty-three?’

‘Young DC, then. Still hadn’t done my first murder. What did you say you did for a living?’

‘Write songs.’

His eyes were deep-sunk in his craggy forehead, like rock-pools. ‘So this’d be ‘The Ballad of Charlie Howe’, then?’

Lol fought the urge to look away, out of the window. ‘How about “The Ballad of Rebekah Smith” ? ’

Charlie raised an eyebrow. ‘Don’t reckon that’s a song would mean an awful lot to me.’

‘Maybe you’d only be in the last verse,’ Lol said.

Merrily lit a cigarette.

Simon St John eased his stool a few inches further along the bench. ‘You always smoke before an exorcism?’

‘Sounds like that old joke,’ Merrily said. ‘ “Do you always smoke after sex? No, only when…” What did he mean, talk to his father?’

‘His father, the chovihano , dead these twenty years. Didn’t speak to Al for the previous twenty because Al came off the road, married a gaujo . Cardinal sin, punishable by lifelong curse. Sally once told me he and Al have been communicating better in the past three years than the previous forty.’

‘Candidly,’ Merrily said, ‘do you believe that stuff?’

‘Why not? They talk to the ancestors like we try to talk to God. Their own ancestors, not anyone else’s.’

‘What about you?’

‘I have a fairly strict rule. I talk to living people, and I try to listen to God. Anything else I see or hear nowadays, I turn off the fucking set, rapido .’

‘You’re saying you’ve seen and heard more than most of us.’

He laughed.

‘And you’ve had a bad experience, with that?’

‘I’ve had a whole sequence of bad experiences, Mrs Watkins. I’ve had the living shit scared out me. I’ve been afraid for myself, for my friends and – worst of all – for my very dear wife, my soulmate.’

Merrily said cautiously, ‘Israel believes all exorcists should be psychic to a degree. Which I suppose means you could be a lot better at this than me.’

‘He doesn’t, however, say all psychics should be exorcists. Spare a cig?’

‘Sorry, I assumed—’

‘Periodic vices. All my vices have been periodic – the worst kind. Look, my view on suffering is simple: you ask the question, “Is anyone benefiting from this?” If not, don’t fucking suffer.’

‘What about Stock?’

‘We couldn’t help Stock. His only recourse was to get out, and I told him that. Al told him that. But Stock was Stock.’

‘So why this, now?’

‘It’s for Sally.’ Simon lit up, holding the cigarette between finger and thumb, like you’d hold a joint. ‘Sally didn’t want Al doing this on his own.’

‘Why does he have to do it at all?’

‘Ancestral ties. Who else is gonna do it? Al was trained for years in the Romany mysteries and then backed off. Bit like me, really, but I only backed off to a place that looked safe. Nowhere’s really safe, is it? You ready, now?’

‘What are we going to do?’

‘Deal with this stupid bitch, I suppose.’ He went up to the picture of Rebekah Smith.

‘I meant, what are we going to do? Those Christian things.’

Simon turned back to Merrily. ‘You ever sleep with Lol?’

‘No.’

‘Poor sod puts you on a pedestal. He thinks you’re a much better person than he is, purer, holier. You’re going to have to make all the running, I fear.’

‘People tend to underestimate Lol,’ Merrily said. ‘Where is he, anyway? I’d somehow expected him to be here.’

‘Nah, this is a priest thing. He drove off somewhere.’

She stiffened. ‘Where?’

He shook his head. ‘Don’t worry about it.’ He had another deep drag on his cigarette. ‘Anyway, I’m very grateful to you for coming.’

‘I’m sure you are, Simon.’

‘Meaning what?’

‘It’s a set-up, isn’t it? For instance, why can’t you and Al do this on your own?’

‘Maybe we could.’

‘No, you bloody couldn’t,’ Merrily said, ‘because you need a woman. Because of the nature of it, there has to be a woman, doesn’t there? It’s a female entity, so it needs a woman’s energy, a woman’s aura. Poor Stephanie underlined that. And who else? Who else before Stephie?’

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.

CHARLIE 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.’