Phil Rickman - Midwinter of the Spirit

‘ DEVIL… UNCLEAN SPIR… IT! ’

No more than a harsh rasp this time, and then he turned away, stumbling, and he and Merrily came face to face.

He put up a hand to her.

She didn’t move. She didn’t speak. There was nothing to say. She had no tradition.

Slowly, she bowed her head.

Felt the heat of his hand a second before his fingers touched her cheek.

Merrily looked up then, and saw in his old, knowing eyes, a small brilliance, before he died.

LOL GAZED INTO Anna Purefoy’s pale eyes. There was no obvious expression in them: no fear, no alarm. Only perhaps the beginning of surprise, or was he imagining that?

There was dust in her fine, fair hair.

No blood at all – Anna’s neck was simply broken. It wasn’t obvious exactly what had done that, but it wasn’t important, was it? Not important now.

He didn’t touch her. He just stood up. Strangely, although part of the loft had come down, six of the ten candles were still alight. No shadows, other than his own, appeared to be moving.

He couldn’t look for very long at Tim Purefoy, who was, mostly, still in his chair, the chair itself crushed into the stairs. The black bull-bars had torn Tim almost in half. One of his legs was…

God! Lol turned away, towards the car. The smell from Tim’s body was hot and foul, and there was still running blood and what might be intestine over the windscreen of the Mitsubishi Intercooler Super-Turbo-whatever the hell it was called.

And something else, half across the roof, which he thought was Moon’s futon fallen from the toppled loft. Making it impossible to see inside the vehicle. The steaming silence, though, was ominous.

Also, the old oak pillar. Nothing but old oak or steel would have stopped the bull-barred Mitsubishi. It had torn down the glazed bay like cellophane, exploded the urbane Tim Purefoy like a rotten melon. But the pillar had held.

He couldn’t make himself go past Tim; he didn’t want to know the details. Instead he squeezed around the back, stepping over the smashed pieces of the chair he’d been sitting in a few minutes ago. If he hadn’t finally lost it… if Anna Purefoy hadn’t pursued him, gleefully taunting him with her knowledge of his obsession for ‘the little woman priest’… he would have been the first to be hit.

When he reached the other side of the car, he found the driver’s window wound down. Right down – as if that was how it had been when the Mitsubishi rammed the glass-covered bay. As though the driver had needed to hear the impact – and the screams.

But there had been no screams audible above the engine’s roar and the sounds of destruction. All too fast, too explosively unexpected.

Denny smiled out at him. ‘Bodged job, eh? I always said it was a… bodged job. They never meant to… turn it into holiday ’commodation. Never planned to renovate it, till… till Kathy showed up. Dead, are they?’

‘Mm,’ Lol said.

‘But you’re all right. I never… I never thought you’d be here. I thought you were a…’ Denny laughed out some blood. ‘… a bit of a nancy, if I’m honest. No… no… you stay there. Don’t fucking look down here, man. Not having you throwing up on my motor.’

‘Shut up now,’ Lol said. ‘I’ll have an ambulance here as soon as I can find the bloody phone.’

‘I think on the table – bottom of the stairs. Be part of my fucking sump now.’

Lol tried the driver’s door. ‘Don’t be stupid, mate,’ Denny said. ‘You open that, I’ll just fall out in several pieces. An Iron Age Celt dies in his chariot. I tell you about my dream? A mystic now, man – finally a fucking mystic.’

Lol saw that Denny’s earring was gone. Or maybe the ear itself.

‘You’re so… indiscreet, Lol. That’s your problem. You don’t trust yourself – always got to tell somebody.’

Lol sighed. ‘The extension. You heard me leaving that message for Merrily.’

‘Been eavesdropping on your calls for weeks, Laurence. Needed to hear what you were saying to Lyden – about Kathy. Could never figure why you weren’t all over Kathy. She attractive, this vicar?’

‘Listen,’ Lol said. ‘I’m going over to the farm. I’ll have to break in and use their phone.’

‘If that makes you feel better. But if I’ve gone to the ancestors, time you get back…’

‘I’ll be less than five minutes. I’ll smash a window in the kitchen.’

‘Got a lot to say to those primitive fuckers,’ Denny muttered. ‘To the ancestors.’

‘Don’t go away,’ Lol said.

‘No. Cold in here, en’t it? Must be the extra ventilation.’

Denny laughed his ruined laugh.

Headlights and warblers. Déjà vu . The ambulance cutting across the green again, directly to the north porch. A police car behind the ambulance. Behind that, a plain Rover: Howe.

‘Later, Annie,’ Merrily said, ‘please? Is that all right? I need to see that Jane’s…’

‘Just don’t go off anywhere,’ Howe said.

‘No further than the hospital.’

‘No,’ Jane protested, sitting up in the back of the ambulance, a paramedic hanging on to her arm. ‘You’re not coming. I’m not going. This is ridiculous. It’s just like… mild concussion.’

‘Could be a hairline fracture, Jane,’ the paramedic warned.

‘No way. This guy’s just blowing it up on account of having his hands all over me.’

‘I had my hands all over you,’ the boy in white said patiently, ‘because you were on fire.’

‘Sure,’ Jane said. Some of her hair was singed, and she had quite a deep cut on her forehead and bruising on the left side of her jaw and under her left eye. ‘And, like, if you’re wearing a dress and your name’s Irene, you think nobody’s going to suspect anything.’

‘Eirion,’ the boy said. There were black smuts all over his hands and his white alb.

‘Whatever.’

‘I’ll be here for quite a while,’ Annie Howe told Merrily. ‘We have to talk in depth, Ms Watkins.’ She pulled Eirion away from the ambulance. ‘I think you need to tell me how she got on fire.’

‘She was down in the crypt – with a candle. She said she must have tripped, but…’ He hesitated. ‘There was nobody else there when I got to her, OK? But she was face-down and her coat was on fire and… I really think you need to talk to James Lyden.’

‘Who’s he?’

‘The Boy Bishop. His parents were looking for him. They’ve probably taken him home. They live in one of those Edwardian houses in Barton Street. And you need to talk to his girlfriend.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Merrily said, ‘I think you definitely want to talk to James’s girlfriend.’

‘Name?’

‘Melissa,’ Eirion said. ‘But she seems to have gone.’

Merrily said, ‘Melissa?’

‘I don’t know her other name. James told me she lives with her foster-parents on a farm up on Dinedor Hill. He knows where it is – he’s been up there a couple of times.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ Merrily said.

She went into the Cathedral and stayed away from everyone, even Sophie. Especially from Sophie – she mustn’t be involved.

Merrily saw that there was a blanket over the body of Thomas Dobbs, and two uniformed policeman guarding it. The nave had a secular feel, like some huge market hall. Spiritual work to be done, here – but by whom?

Jane had absolutely refused to let Merrily go with her to the hospital, but in the end she had accepted Eirion’s company. Merrily smiled faintly. The boy must have masochistic tendencies.

Across the nave, over by Bishop Stanbury’s ornate chantry, she saw Huw Owen pacing about, hands deep in the pockets of his RAF greatcoat. She hadn’t spoken to him yet, although George Curtiss had told her it had been Huw who’d brought Dobbs along, after helping him sign himself out of the General Hospital.