Phil Rickman - The Cure of Souls

‘And the more outlets you send it to, the more money you collect.’

‘Sure, news is a business. But it’s in our interest, at the end of the day, to make sure the story’s sound – or at least, you know, stands up – or else various outlets are gonna stop coming back to us. If you get a reputation for being a bent agency, it’s not good, long-term.’

‘But, bottom line, this probably is a scam.’

Fred hesitated. ‘I don’t know. He’s a bombastic kind of bloke – comes over like big mates soon as he meets you – but underneath… I reckon there was something worrying him. He was really shaky. I mean, when people are quivering and telling you how terrified they are, it could be an act. But when somebody’s got this veneer of cockiness, and something else – call it fear – shows through, that’s harder to fake, isn’t it? Or it could mean he’s got a drink problem or something, I really wouldn’t like to say. You’re not gonna drop me in it, are you? I mean, I’d love to work for the Independent or something, but you’ve got to take what you can get.’

‘Life’s such a bitch, Fred. What did you ring for, anyway?’

‘A follow-up, I suppose, a new line on the story. I mean, you said you were going to look into it…’

‘I didn’t really, though, did I? What I said—’

‘Give me a break, Merrily. I think you’ll find a few papers’ll pick up on this again tomorrow.’

‘Meaning you’ll try and persuade them to.’

‘It’s…’ Fred Potter whistled thinly. ‘It’s a business, like I said.’

‘All right – off the record?’

He sighed. ‘Yeah, OK.’

‘I’m in a difficult position,’ Merrily said. ‘It’s hard for me to move on anything unless the local minister requests assistance. In this case, it strikes me that the local guy, St John, knows exactly what Mr Stock’s up to. So I don’t think we’re going to want to get involved.’

‘But if you do take it any further…’

‘I’ll let you know, promise.’

‘That’s what they all say.’

‘Yeah, but I’m a minister of the Church, Fred.’

‘Hmm,’ Fred Potter said.

Merrily washed up her solitary dinner plate, went back into the scullery and called the Shelbones yet again.

The phone rang and rang, and she just knew the bungalow wasn’t empty. She imagined all three Shelbones standing in the narrow hall, silently watching the base unit quivering. These Shelbones were wearing starched Puritan dress, like the Pilgrim Fathers, and the phone was a dangerous conduit to a bad, modern world that they believed could only do them harm.

She put back the receiver, picked up her cigarettes and lighter and took them into the kitchen, where she put the kettle on. She stood at the west window, waiting for the water to boil, looking out on the twilit garden and the scrum of shadows in the apple orchard where, in 1670, the Rev. Wil Williams, of this parish, was said to have hanged himself to escape a charge of witchcraft. It was claimed Wil had frolicked here with sylphs and fauns. Except it probably hadn’t been so simple.

Merrily recalled Amy Shelbone’s thin body surrendering to that eerie shiver.

Who’s Justine, Amy?

She slid a cigarette between her lips and flicked at the lighter. Nothing happened. Several more flicks raised nothing more than sparks. Merrily took her shoulder bag to the kitchen table and felt inside for matches. Something rolled heavily across the table and fell to the floor.

The room was sinking into the dregs of the day. She put on lights and finally found a book of matches with the logo of the Black Swan Hotel. Its timber-pillared porch stood across the cobbled village square from the vicarage under a welcoming lantern, and she briefly thought how pleasant it would be to wander across there in the dusk and sit in the new beer garden at the back with a glass of white wine.

She sat down at the kitchen table, lit her cigarette and saw, through the smoke, an image of Jane at the front gate yesterday morning. Merrily bit her lip, leaned back out of the smoke, and finally bent and picked up the misshapen penny dated 1797. It must have rolled from her bag, though she didn’t remember putting it in there.

It just kept turning up. Like a bad penny.

If you don’t like the cold, come out of the mortuary , Huw Owen had said mercilessly.

Merrily sat for a while, with Ethel the black cat winding around her ankles, and smoked another cigarette before she left the vicarage.

It was that luminous period, well beyond sunset, when the northern sky had kindled its own cool light show above the timbered eaves of Ledwardine and the wooded hills beyond. The village lights were subdued between mullions, behind diamond panes.

Wearing her light cotton alb, ankle-length, tied loosely at the waist with white cord, Merrily crossed the cobbles and slipped quietly through the lychgate.

The church looked monolithic, rising out of a black tangle of gravestones and apple trees into a sky streaked with salmon and green. In a summer concession to trickle-tourism, the oak door was still unlocked, but she assumed she’d be alone in here; since evensong had been discontinued, Sunday night was the quietest time.

She didn’t put on the church lights, finding her way up the central aisle by the muddy lustre left by dulled stained glass on shiny pew-ends and sandstone pillars. It was cool in the nave, but not cold.

In the chancel, behind the screen of oaken apples, she took out her book of matches and lit two candles on the altar, creating woolly, white-gold globes which brought the sandstone softly to life.

She placed the old penny on the altar, blessing it again.

‘ As I use it in faith, forgive my sins …’

It was, she realized now, not a game of chance but a simple act of faith. Of trust. Most priests, in times of crisis, would open the Bible at random, trusting that meaningful lines would leap out, telling them which way to jump.

How different was that to one of Jane’s New Age gurus cutting the Tarot pack?

The difference was Christian faith. There was a huge difference. Wasn’t there?

The candles had hollowed out for her a sanctum of light, with the nave falling away into greyness, along with the organ pipes and the Bull Chapel with its seventeenth-century tomb. The atmosphere was calm and absorbent, the church’s recharging time just beginning. As Jane would point out smugly, this was a site of worship long-predating Christianity. You’re employing some ancient energy there, Mum .

Pre-dating Jesus Christ perhaps, she’d reply swiftly – but not pre-dating God.

Gods . Jane grinning like an elf. And goddesses .

Merrily let the kid’s image fade, like the Cheshire cat, into the flickering air, with its compatible scents of polish and hot beeswax. She knelt before the altar, her covered knees at the edge of the carpet, just within the globes of light.

OK .

She closed her eyes and whispered the Lord’s Prayer and then knelt in silence for several minutes, feeling the soft light around her like an aura. She remembered, as always, those deep and silent moments in the little Celtic chapel where her spiritual journey had begun: the moments of the blue and the gold and the lamplit path.

Her breathing slowed. She felt warm with anticipation and dismissed the sensation immediately.

Then she summoned Amy Shelbone.

More minutes passed before she was able to visualize the child: Amy wearing her school uniform, clean and crisp, tie straight, hair brushed, complexion almost translucently white and clear. Amy kneeling at the altar, as she’d been on the Sunday she was sick.

I don’t know anything about her , Merrily confessed to God. I don’t know what her problem is. I don’t know if she’s in need of spiritual help or psychological help or just love. I don’t know. I want to help her, but I don’t want to interfere if that’s going to harm her .