Phil Rickman - The Cure of Souls

‘I gather.’

‘How old?’

‘Fourteen.’

‘Well…’ Merrily tapped her pencil on the desk, remembering similar phases. ‘No need to get too carried away about that. Unless—’ An obvious thought had struck her. ‘Could she be pregnant?’

‘ What? Oh… I see what you mean.’ He was silent for a moment, thinking it over. ‘Well, she… seemed to me to be a very young fourteen. She was wearing her school uniform, which in itself is a rather uncommon sight these days, out of school hours.’

‘True.’ Half of Jane’s school clothes seemed to have vanished by the time she reached home.

‘Let me tell you the main thing,’ Dennis said. ‘It seems Amy had been brought along to Holy Communion precisely because her parents were getting worried about her spiritual health. In the old-fashioned sense.’

‘Meaning what, exactly?’

Dennis hesitated and then sighed. ‘Meaning they’re now asking for something I would not personally be happy to undertake,’ he replied eventually.

As Merrily went into the kitchen, Ethel the cat looked up at her from a sun-pool on a deep window sill. No sign of Jane; the kid must have gone back up to her apartment in the attic. Merrily went back into the scullery, stared at the phone for a few seconds and then picked it up and rang Sophie at the gatehouse.

‘I’m just following procedure here, Soph.’

‘Do we have a procedure?’ The Bishop’s lay secretary, servant of the Cathedral and posher than the Queen, would be in her office next to the Deliverance room, from where she also dealt with the admin side of Merrily’s business.

‘We have a rule. There’s only one situation where we have a rule,’ Merrily said, ‘and this is it.’

‘I see.’ A tiny pause, a vacuum snap – Sophie uncapping her gold Cross fountain pen. ‘What would you like me to tell the Bishop? We’re talking major exorcism?’

‘Won’t be an exorcism at all, if I can help it. I suspect they don’t know quite what they want, apart from some reassurance. I’m just informing the Bishop, according to the rule .’

Jane appeared in the doorway. ‘What?’ She saw the phone at Merrily’s ear and rolled her eyes.

‘Sorry, Sophie, I’ve just got to ask Jane something before her very limited patience snaps.’

‘I am sixteen,’ Jane muttered. ‘As you keep telling me, I have all the bloody time in the world.’

‘You know a kid called Amy Shelbone?’

Jane blinked. ‘Know the name. Probably.’

‘I think she goes to your school.’

‘She does?’

‘Not in your class, then?’

‘No, she… I guess she’s probably in the fourth… or the third year. Something like that.’

‘OK.’ Merrily nodded. ‘Thanks, flower.’ Worth a try, but kids in a lower form were pond life. ‘Sorry, Sophie.’

Jane didn’t leave. Merrily frowned at her. ‘You’ll miss the bus.’

‘So like, what’s this Amy Shel… thing done?’

‘Go,’ said Merrily.

She waited until she heard the front door slam. Her dog collar lay in the centre of the pale blue blotter, glowing in the sunbeam. Sophie would disapprove of her discarding it simply because of the heat. The women’s ministry had been hard-won; it was like some ex-suffragette not turning out for the polls because it was raining.

‘Sorry about that.’

‘I think you can assume she’s gone now,’ Sophie said. ‘But you may wish to check the room for listening devices.’

Sophie would also disapprove of Merrily asking the kid about Amy Shelbone, but Merrily knew it would go no further. It had reached the stage, with Jane, where there was a certain trust, forged out of experience. Jane was sixteen; there wasn’t such a huge age-gap between them. They told each other almost everything. Didn’t they?

She sat for a while at her desk, looking down the garden towards the apple trees. She was thinking about Father Nicholas Ellis, the fundamentalist zealot who had interpreted the term cure of souls all too freely, administering exorcism like doctors prescribed antibiotics, without ever consulting the Bishop.

But at least Ellis had certainty, a complete faith not only in God and all His angels, but in himself as the approved wielder of an archangel’s broadsword. How he must have despised her.

Merrily put on her dog collar.

Ellis had crossed the line, big-time. She was never going to do that, God help her. Nor was it up to the priest to decide who was genuine, who was misguided, and who was trying it on.

She knelt by the side of the desk, under the window, put her hands together, the backs of her thumbs against the centre of her forehead. She closed her eyes, let her thoughts fall away. The sunshine through her eyelids made her feel washed in a warm orange glow. It felt good.

Too good. Merrily moved into shadow, facing the white-painted wall of four-hundred-year-old wattle and daub, and prayed for perception.

Since Dennis Beckett had first told her about Amy Shelbone, she’d been thinking, on and off, about the occasion she’d thrown up in church herself – her own church, on the fraught night of her installation as priest in charge. Churches were powerful places; they sometimes amplified emotions, might well have an emetic effect on stored-up stress. It didn’t necessarily mean any kind of invasion .

However, this was at Holy Communion, and a dramatically adverse reaction to the presence of the sacrament was… something that needed to be looked into.

After a few minutes, Merrily picked up the phone and called the number Dennis Beckett had given her for the Shelbones, in Dilwyn.

There was no answer.

THE FIRST TIME Lol saw Gerard Stock, he thought the bloke must have some kind of status here, that maybe he was the original owner of the whole place, including the stables and the pigsties.

This was perhaps because Gerard Stock kind of swaggered .

It was not a word Lol recalled ever mentally applying to anyone before. Stock walked like he was shouldering his way through a crowd of people who didn’t matter, to get to somebody who did. This looked odd, because he was all alone on the track which crossed the hay meadow. No bushes, no banks of nettles, no cows; nothing but lush, knee-high grass in a valley smouldering with summer.

It was eleven-thirty in the morning, and Stock was heading their way.

Prof was not glad to see him. ‘The sodding countryside. You get more privacy in Notting Hill. He wants to know who you are. He always has to know who everybody is, the bastard. He’s obviously seen you walking around here and he thinks you might be someone of significance.’

‘Obviously hasn’t noticed my car, then.’

Lol was standing, with a mug of tea and a slice of toast, at the window of the studio anteroom-cum-kitchen, which had once been a pigsty and now possibly looked even more of one.

‘This guy…’ Prof drained his mug, added it to a pile of unwashed crockery beside the sink. ‘I ask myself, should I have to cope with guys like this any more, my time of life? The business is top-heavy with the bastards, always has been. They know everybody – shared spliffs with Jerry Garcia, toured with Dylan, played jew’s harp on the cut that never made it onto Blood on the Tracks … which, of course, is how come their name was tragically omitted from the sleeve. These guys…’ Prof palmed his stubbly white chin. ‘These guys are losers the likes of which I hoped that by moving out here I should never have to encounter again.’

‘So who exactly is he, Prof?’ Lol saw a man who was not that much taller than he was, but wide and powerful. A man swaggering like he owned the place, but not hurrying. A man wanting them to know he was coming.