Phil Rickman - The Cure of Souls

‘But you recognized her ?’

‘Wasn’t sure at first. Not till we were upstairs together and she was on the bed and you and Stock had gone… and then suddenly she was .’

‘Because of the hop-bine?’

‘The Lady of the Bines? Who never existed? Who is an invented ghost?’

‘Remind me about that again.’

Merrily lit a cigarette; she’d smoked it by the time he’d finished.

‘So the museum woman made it up. You been back to ask her, Lol?’

He shook his head.

‘Hops.’ Merrily tapped the tea tray with her fingertips. ‘Think hops.’

‘Hop-pillows? Stock said hop-pillows were supposed to give you a better night’s sleep. But not in this case.’

‘Hops as a turn-on? The first time you saw her, she was naked and winding a hop-bine around her. And up in the bedroom, she was playing with an old hop-bine again – a hop-bine, which she was again using in a… lubricious fashion. How did you feel?’

‘Embarrassed. Scared.’

‘And maybe just a bit…?’

‘I’ll stick with scared and embarrassed.’

‘Basic nymphomania?’ Merrily wondered. ‘That can be a mental illness, can’t it? I mean, people have a good laugh about it. Men in pubs always like to pretend they wish their wives would catch it, but it’s a mental illness, isn’t it?’

Lol considered. ‘I don’t even think it’s a clinical term. There are no criteria to back it up. It’s applied to women who want “too much sex” – but how much is too much? And what do you call a male nymphomaniac? Could be a purely sexist term, because a woman who lives for sex is a slut, while a man who can’t get enough is a role model.’

‘Wow,’ Merrily said, ‘you really have been on a course.’

He looked uncomfortable at that. He pulled off his glasses and began to polish them on the hem of his T-shirt. Merrily slid down to the rug and leaned back against the side of the bed, her bare arms around her knees. She was aware of the irony of being alone in a bedroom talking about sex with a man she’d always found attractive, but in circumstances that rendered the whole subject forbidding. Like going into a tobacconist’s to discuss emphysema.

‘We’re going round in circles, Lol.’

He told her about the odd words uttered by Stephie in the bedroom, the foreign language which definitely wasn’t French, might have been Welsh. And then Don’t say no to me …

‘As if someone else had been saying no to her? Well, Stock’s a lot older than she was and probably close to being an alcoholic, which—’

‘—is no cure for impotence,’ Lol said. ‘And I think I’m right in saying the number one reason for men killing their wives is being drunk and on the receiving end of taunts about not being able to perform. And Stock’s an arrogant guy. Very, very hard for someone like that to admit to sexual inadequacy. And if he doesn’t say another word to explain why he did it, that’s probably what they’ll put it down to.’

‘If,’ Merrily said heavily, ‘there hadn’t also been what they will insist on describing as an exorcism.’

They were both silent. It occurred to Merrily that she might have done rather better if Lol had accompanied her as a psychologist, part of her putative Deliverance team.

He stood up and leaned against the window sill next to the lamp. ‘How about if I go back to Bliss and tell him about Stephanie?’

She looked up at him. ‘You’d hate to have to do that.’

‘It might alter the direction of their inquiries. And it’s the truth.’

She went and stood next to him. ‘They wouldn’t believe you.’

‘ You did.’

‘Also, Howe would take enormous pleasure in bringing up your… past record.’

He smiled. ‘Hazey Jane Two?’

They looked at one another; she saw his face soften. It was the kind of confluence of gazes that might normally have progressed rapidly to a meeting of mouths.

But the moment passed, and Merrily went and sat on the bed.

‘Call this a vague guess,’ she said, ‘but it’s my feeling that if there’s one person who could explain much of this, it’s Simon St John.’

Lol used a phone plugged into the wall next to Prof’s garden recliner. The call was answered in seconds.

‘Who’s this?’

‘It’s…’ He always found it hard to identify himself. ‘It’s Lol.’

A sigh. ‘Sorry, mate. Thought you were the media. About to tell you to fuck off.’

‘You said that to the papers?’ He really didn’t care, did he? What must it be like not to care? ‘Had many calls tonight?’

‘Not as many as I expected.’ Simon sounded tired, though, like he’d been doing a lot of talking.

‘But the police have been round?’

‘Briefly.’

Lol said, ‘So you know everything.’

‘This is the English countryside,’ Simon said. ‘Everybody within a six-mile radius knew everything by teatime.’

‘You don’t sound surprised.’

‘I’m getting over it.’

‘The thing is,’ Lol said, ‘Merrily Watkins is here.’

‘Good for you.’

‘It’s not looking good for her.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘We thought you might like to talk. Now… or tomorrow morning? There’s quite a lot to—’

‘No, there isn’t,’ Simon St John said curtly. ‘It’s over. Let the police sort it out.’

‘Hang on, how can you—?’

‘It’s over , Lol.’

The vicar hung up on him.

The old pine door of Lol’s loft opened on to a rickety wooden gallery directly above the mixing board, overlooking the studio floor – moonlight now falling through the skylight on to snaking cables and the Boswell guitar on her stand.

It must have been after three a.m. when he came out and stood there, leaning on the basically unsafe rustic railing. Times like this when you smoked a cigarette. Maybe he should start, if only to get through the nights.

He’d just dreamed of the Lady of the Bines again, weaving and rustling towards him, and this time she was a ghost and she came in a shroud of cold, and her eyes were like smoke, and Lol had shuddered awake.

He stood on the gallery – the minstrel’s gallery, Prof called it – and thought about Merrily, lying no more than forty feet away, thought about how close he’d come to kissing her. Clearly it just wasn’t meant; as she’d pointed out herself, only weird cats jumped into his lap.

And although he thought about her every day, only negative circumstances had ever brought them together, and even then… He was aware that tonight they’d attempted to analyse his experiences but hadn’t even touched on hers: whatever had happened to her in the kiln, whatever it was that had made her appear to choke, sent her dashing around the place flinging open doors.

It’s over , Simon St John had said. Was it?

Was Gerard Stock lying awake in his cell at Hereford Police Station, going back over the day, screening the movie? Lol tried to see that movie – Stock, still angry after showing Merrily the door, walking in on Stephie… Don’t say no to me … Predatory Stephie. Gerard Stock imploding, like an old radio blowing all its valves.

It struck Lol that Stock could still virtually walk away from this. Only in exceptional circumstances these days did the perpetrators of hot-blooded domestic murders get life. A domestic killing was a one-off, the killer no danger to the public. In this case, the killer had been under massive stress, heightened by an exorcism that hadn’t worked.

It could, in the end, be Merrily who came off worst. A career wrecked. More than a career, a calling.

It’s over .

In the hour before dawn – the only way to cool the fever of his thoughts – Lol wrote a song and, as the sun came up, sat in the shadows of the booth with the Boswell guitar and played it through, complete.