Phil Rickman - The Cure of Souls

‘ I ’m jealous of your daughter,’ Merrily said ambivalently.

Charlie laughed and patted her wrist. ‘Scones,’ he said. ‘I feel like some scones. You don’t diet, do you?’

‘My whole job’s a diet.’

‘Scones, my love,’ he called to the waitress before she’d even made it to the table. ‘Lashings of jam and heaps of fresh cream. And coffee.’

‘Just spring water for me, please, Charlie, I’m afraid I don’t have very long. I’m sorry.’

She and Lol were due to meet at the Deliverance office in the gatehouse at five. Lol had said he had things to tell her, but neither of them had wanted to hang around Knight’s Frome. It was a blessing, in Merrily’s view, that someone like Lol had been there, seen the way it had gone, the two faces of Gerard Stock.

‘We better get down to it, then,’ Charlie said. ‘Brother Shelbone.’ He clicked his tongue. ‘Not wrong about that one, were you, Merrily? As for the little lass…’

‘Little lass?’

He looked pained. ‘Give me some credit, girl. This suicidal Shelbone child and that kiddie getting messages from her dear dead mother, courtesy of Allan Henry’s stepdaughter – one and the same, or what?’

‘You never retired at all, did you?’

‘I tell you, my sweet,’ said Charlie Howe, ‘the longer you live in this little county, the more you wonder how anybody manages to keep anything a secret. There are connections a-crisscrossing here that you will not believe.’

‘Really?’

‘She was very lucky, mind – the child. The version I heard, the mother only found out because she’d got a headache herself, and saw the aspirins were down to about three in the bottom of the jar. Another half-hour and your colleague over in Dilwyn would’ve had a very sad funeral.’

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘No cry for help, this one. Kiddie must’ve been messed up big-time. You were dead right, and Brother Morrell was dead wrong, out of touch.’

‘He didn’t know the full circumstances.’

‘Nor wanted to, Merrily, nor wanted to. I tell you another thing – nobody who was at the Christmas Fair’s likely to forget that girl of Allan Henry’s. Jesus Christ, no…’ He looked suddenly appalled. ‘Oh, I am sorry. Easy to forget what you do, Reverend, when you’re out of uniform.’

‘Doesn’t offend me , Charlie, long as it’s not gratuitous. Keeps His name in circulation.’

Charlie Howe raised both eyebrows. The scones arrived. ‘Put plenty of jam on,’ Charlie said. ‘You’ll be needing the blood sugar.’

Then on to David Shelbone. ‘Got to admire him, really,’ Charlie said. ‘Sticks his neck out for what he believes. You know anything about listed buildings?’

‘I live in one.’

‘So you do.’

‘Frozen in the year 1576. I pray we never get an inspection, because my daughter’s created what she calls The Mondrian Walls in her attic… all the squares of nice white plaster and whatever between the beams are now painted different colours.’

‘Good example,’ Charlie said. ‘Most listed-buildings officers would let that one go, because you can always paint them over again in white. Brother Shelbone – forget it. A stickler. Told one of our lady councillors she had to take down a conservatory porch she’d put on her farmhouse. When the good councillor tries to square it with the department under the table, it gets leaked to the press. Red faces all round. That’s David Shelbone: staunch Christian, not for sale.’

‘And that’s bad, is it?’

Charlie grinned. ‘Oh, it’s not bad. It’s good, it’s remarkable – and that’s the point. In the world of local government, a very religious man who cannot tell a lie or condone dishonesty of any kind is remarkable.’

‘Meaning a pain in the bum.’

‘Correct. It was widely thought that when the councils were all reorganized, he’d get mislaid, as it were, in the changeover. But he survived.’

He looks after the old places, makes sure nobody knocks them down or tampers with them . Hazel Shelbone in the church. They offered him early retirement last year, but he said he wouldn’t know what to do with himself .

Merrily licked jam from a finger. ‘His wife indicated he’d been under some pressure.’ Migraines, Hazel had explained. ‘Maybe that’s not been a happy household for a while.’

She didn’t look at Charlie Howe, helped herself to a second scone. Anything said to her by Mrs Shelbone ought to be treated as confidential; on the other hand, Charlie expected give and take. After forty years in the police and now local government, it would be how his mind worked.

‘Pressure,’ he said. ‘Oh, no question about that. Brother Shelbone’s under serious pressure. Over Barnchurch alone.’

‘The new trading estate, up past Belmont?’

‘Source of much weeping and gnashing of teeth,’ Charlie confirmed.

‘Well, it looks awful,’ Merrily said. ‘There was a time, not too many years ago, when Hereford used to resemble a country town. I mean, do we really need a supermarket every couple of hundred yards? DIY world? Computerland? It’s like some kind of commercial purgatory between rural paradise and traffic hell.’

‘My, my.’ Charlie added cream to his coffee.

‘Nothing personal.’

He leaned back, hands clasped behind his head. ‘What do you know about the origins of Barnchurch? The history of the site.’

‘Fields and woodland, home to little birds and animals.’

‘Gethyn Bonner? You know about him?’

‘Not a thing.’

‘Thought you’d know about Gethyn Bonner. He was a preacher. Came up from the Valleys in the 1890s, sometime like that.’

‘Ten a penny,’ Merrily said with a small smile.

‘Tell a few of my colleagues that. Tell English Heritage.’

‘I’m not following.’

‘Gethyn Bonner was an itinerant firebrand preacher with a big following, who came out of Merthyr Tydfil and decided Hereford was the land of milk and honey.’

‘As you do.’

Charlie drank some coffee. ‘Hadn’t got a chapel of his own, but a good Christian farmer, name of Leathem Baxter, had a barn to spare. A few local worthies, including a craftsman builder, all gathered round and they put a big Gothic window in the back wall, and in no time at all Leathem Baxter’s barn was a bona fide church.’

‘Barnchurch.’

‘Exactly. Well, in time, Gethyn Bonner falls out of favour, as these fellers are apt to do, and moves on up to Birmingham or back to the Valleys, I wouldn’t know which, and Leathem Baxter dies and the church becomes a barn again, and the Gothic window gets bricked up… and it’s all forgotten until the Third Millennium comes to pass.’

‘And, lo, there came property developers…’ said Merrily.

‘Barnchurch Trading Estate Phase One. Should be completed in time for Christmas shopping. Phase Two, however… that’s the problem. Nothing in its way except a derelict agricultural building, not very old – Victorian brick – and falling to bits.’

‘I see.’ Merrily poured some spring water.

‘Well, even before work started on Phase One, the developers had been assured by the Hereford planners that there’d be no bar at all to flattening this unsightly structure – which, as it happens, also blocks the only practical entrance to the site of Phase Two. Reckoning, of course, without Brother Shelbone.’

‘Suddenly, I like him a lot.’

‘Who helpfully points out that, although the building itself is of limited architectural merit and not, in fact, very old, its historical curiosity value makes it a monument well meriting preservation.’

‘It’s fair enough,’ Merrily said. ‘They should’ve consulted him before they started.’