Phil Rickman - The Cure of Souls

They both looked up at the kiln house.

‘Now why,’ said Stock, ‘would the dear old turd-burglar let his beloved home fall into the hands of a man he couldn’t stand the fucking sight of? You’re right. He didn’t bequeath his house to Gerard Stock. He bequeathed Gerard Stock to Adam Lake.’

Stock coughed, then laughed. The sun was sinking fast, and the side of the kiln house facing the nearest barn was already almost black in its shadow.

‘When Lake finds out who inherited, we get a letter from his agent, making an offer. We refuse. That’s when the second barn goes up.’ He nodded at the house. ‘There you go – power’s back on.’

Lights had appeared in two of the windows in the shadowed wall. None of them seemed to be very big windows, Lol noticed, and the Stocks wouldn’t even be allowed to enlarge them because the kiln house would be on the historic-buildings list. Living there couldn’t be easy; it would look like deepest winter all year round.

‘You have to keep lights on all day?’

‘Some. Yeah, we live like moles, but it’s a liddle better than the trailer.’

‘What, even though—?’ Lol broke off. He couldn’t say it.

Stock could. ‘Even though we have our dining table resting on the flagstones where the nice gypsy boys spread Uncle Stewart’s brains?’

He burst out laughing again, but it was shallower this time and soon tailed off. The light that Lol remembered from the other night came on palely below the conical roof of the kiln.

‘Spooky.’ Stock’s cigarette lit up in his rosebud lips, like a spark from the setting sun. He stood with his legs apart, looking like some kind of psychotic troll. ‘It’s a spooky place. You believe in ghosts, Lol?’

Lol thought of the naked woman in the naked hop-yard who, for one icy moment—

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I suppose I do.’

‘I don’t.’ Stock squeezed out his cigarette between finger and thumb and winced. ‘But something needs dealing with.’

LATE SATURDAY AFTERNOON, the vicarage seemed more still and vast than Merrily had ever known it. One woman, seven bedrooms. Even the kitchen was as quiet as a crypt.

Wearing Jane’s old Radiohead T-shirt, she sat down at the table, took out the lumpy old penny from a hip pocket of her jeans, and stared at the blurred woman with the trident. Some broads had all the backbone.

In the dawn-lit chancel, she’d blessed the coin on the altar – and then been unable to go through with the rest, spending the next half-hour on her knees, concluding that she was not a natural psychic and could never imagine herself approaching a state of grace.

And then it had been time to go home and finish the last bits of Jane’s packing and help carry her bags out to the boot of Eirion’s stepmother’s silver BMW, where Eirion stowed it as carefully as if it was the kid’s trousseau and kept looking over his shoulder at Jane, as if to make sure she was still there, his guileless face breaking into the kind of smile that told you everything you didn’t really want to know.

Merrily caught herself thinking he was the sort of guy Jane ought to meet in about ten years’ time, when she’d… been around?

God, it was always so hard. Sometimes you wished they could have some kind of life-experience cell implanted in their brains as soon as they hit puberty.

Jane was being practical, methodical, counting off on her fingers all the things she needed to take – and avoiding Eirion’s eyes, Merrily noticed. Eirion she thought she could understand; Jane was more complex. Jane, she suspected, would always be complex.

Last night, the power hadn’t gone off. They hadn’t managed a proper talk, but what was she supposed to have said, anyway: Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do ? At about three and a half years older than Jane, she’d been pregnant.

‘You will be OK, won’t you, Mum?’ The kid wore a high-necked lemon-and-white striped top and white jeans. She’d looked about nine.

‘Yes, flower, I’ll avoid junk food, I won’t drink to excess, I’ll observe speed limits and I’ll try to be home before midnight.’ The kid was still looking too serious; her mood clearly did not match Eirion’s. ‘And, erm… I expect you’ll ring occasionally from Pembrokeshire?’

‘Course.’

‘Got enough money?’

‘I won’t flash the plastic unless things get really tight, if that’s—’

‘Whatever,’ Merrily said. ‘Do you want to take the mobile?’

They still only had one between them.

‘Your need’s far greater than mine. Besides, it’s supposed to be a holiday.’ Jane picked up Ethel, the black cat, and nuzzled her. ‘A whole month. She won’t remember me.’

‘Of course she will.’

‘Anyway, I can borrow Irene’s phone.’

‘Ring any time. Any time at all.’

‘It’s all in.’ Eirion had closed the boot and stood with his back to the car, his baseball cap hanging from both hands at waist level, obviously trying to control his smile, contain a youthful glee that might be viewed as uncool.

‘Off you go, then, flower.’ Merrily accepted Ethel, popping her down on the lawn, where she lifted a paw and began to lick it, unconcerned. Cats.

Hugging them at the gate, Eirion had felt reassuringly stocky and trustworthy. Jane’s face had felt hot.

Now, Merrily laid the coin on the table, her eyes suddenly filling up, a hollow feeling in her chest.

She was thirty-seven years old.

She wondered sometimes if the kid’s dead father, the faithless Sean, could ever see them. She tried to remember if Sean had ever been remotely like Eirion, but the only image she could conjure up was the range of emotions – dismay, anger, resignation and a final apologetic tenderness – warping his twenty-year-old face on the night she’d told him that something that would turn out to be Jane had been detected.

She walked aimlessly into the echoey hall, looked at herself in the mirror, a good two inches shorter than Jane now. On her, the one-size, once-venerated, Radiohead T-shirt looked as baggy as a surplice.

She thought about taking the coin to the church again. But it wasn’t long after five p.m., and there’d probably still be the odd tourist about. Or worse, a local. The vicar tossing a coin at the altar? It’d be all round the village before closing time at the Black Swan.

On impulse, she went out to the Volvo.

Unfinished business: a surprise visit to the Shelbones in the cool of a Saturday evening. Just happening to be passing.

In the churchyard at Dilwyn, the yews threw big shadows across three women leaving the porch. None of them was Hazel Shelbone, and when Merrily reached the bungalow, there was no car in the drive and the garage doors were open – no vehicle inside.

Family outing?

But as Merrily drove slowly past, she caught a flicker of movement at the end of a path running alongside the garage.

She drove on for about two hundred yards, past the last house in the lane, and parked the Volvo next to a metal field-gate. With no animals in the field, she figured it was safe to leave the car there for a while. She got out and walked back to the Shelbones’ bungalow, where she pressed the bell and waited.

No answer. OK. Round the back.

The flagged path dividing the bungalow and the concrete garage ended at a small black wrought-iron gate. As Merrily went quietly through it she heard a handle turning, like a door opening at the rear of the house. Around the corner of the bungalow, she came face to face with Amy Shelbone, emerging from a glassed-in back porch.

The girl jumped back in alarm, her face red and ruched-up, thin, bare arms down by her sides, stiff as dead twigs, fists clenched tight.