Phil Rickman - Midwinter of the Spirit

‘Wrong,’ the Bishop said. ‘James gave his old man the slip. The last thing James wanted was to go back home in disgrace – Hereford-cred is Dick Lyden’s raison d’être . The boy’s now undone all the good work for him. I told James he could hang out at the Palace for a while. Nobody knows he’s there. Nobody there but me today, as Val left for the Cotswolds this morning. Rather an unpleasant, maladjusted boy, our James.’

‘Yes.’

‘He nearly killed your daughter.’

‘Yes.’

‘And who knows what he’ll do now?’ Mick said.

He came towards her, moving as an athlete, his arms loose. She knew that if she tried to run past him, towards the closed-down snackbar and the steps, he’d catch her easily. She stopped in the middle of the circular lawn, near the fountain with its stone pot on top. She put her hands up. He waited, a couple of yards away, moonlight on his hair.

‘Look—’ She tried to produce a laugh. ‘How about we treat this like last night’s conversation and pretend it never happened?’

Somewhere, over God knew how many intervening walls, she heard a car start up. That was the only sound.

‘I don’t think so,’ he said quietly. ‘I think you’d better carry on talking.’

‘I think I’ve said all I want to say.’

‘But not all I want to know.’

She found she’d now backed up against the ruined wall, far too high to get over. Probably the Bishop’s Palace garden behind.

‘There are people,’ she said, ‘who wish us ill. And I think – whether unwillingly, or because of blackmail, or something – you’ve been playing on their side.’

Her right shoulder rammed against a projecting stone, and she winced.

‘All the signs for them… Cantilupe’s shrine in pieces, I suppose, was the main one… I mean, if Dobbs had still been official, the spiritual defences would have been so much stronger, wouldn’t they? Instead of him having to struggle alone and furtively at night, exposed to whatever psychic influences were at work.’

She began to edge, inch by inch, along the wall. There was a lower section further along, no more than three feet high. OK, she might wind up on the Palace lawn, but she could make it down to the river bank and…

Oh Jesus, that was wrong, wasn’t it?

But what alternative was there? She kept moving – imperceptibly, she hoped.

‘Try pinching yourself,’ the Bishop said. ‘It might all be a dream, a silly fantasy.’

‘I don’t think so. And I still don’t know what you believe, if anything. I don’t even know if you believe that what they’re doing is likely to have any effect whatsoever.’

He smiled and stepped back from her. ‘You know, I never wanted to be a bishop. There’ve been far too many in my family. From an early age I knew what unholy shits most of them were, so I never wanted to be one of them. No, I wanted to be a rock star – or a cabinet minister. I actually quite envied poor Tony, for a while, but politicians… everyone suspects them, don’t they?’

‘Do they?’

‘Politicians are capable of anything, whereas bishops… bishops somehow are still seen as quite remarkably saintly. They might occasionally make some ill-advised remark about the fantasy of a virgin birth, but they don’t embezzle large sums, fuck other people’s wives or… what? What else don’t they do, Merrily? What else don’t bishops do?’

‘Oh God,’ she said. ‘Don’t make me say it.’

He straightened up, a foot taller than her.

‘Let’s go in now,’ she said. ‘You’ve already sacked me. I’m pretty stupid, really. A lousy exorcist, too.’ She shook her head. ‘I’ll go away immediately. I’ll apply for vicar of Penzance.’

‘Merrily, what else don’t bishops do?’

‘I don’t know that you did it. And if you did, I don’t understand why – or even if it was an accident.’

‘Go on.’

‘Paul Sayer – the Satanist dragged from the river.’

‘Ah,’ he said.

‘I think you know how he died,’ she said.

And she dived for the low wall.

He caught her easily and threw her down, well away from the wall, into the frozen flowerbed under the central fountain. He slapped her hard, backwards, forwards, across both cheeks, shocking away her scream as he straddled her, pushing her skirt up and thrusting a hand between her legs.

He gave a long, ragged, rueful sigh.

Then took his hand away.

She froze up.

‘The really unfortunate part, for me, Merrily,’ he said, ‘is that I cannot give you what you so richly deserve and would probably end up rather enjoying.’

She couldn’t move. She heard herself panting in terror, panting so loud that it might have been coming from someone else lying next to her.

‘DNA,’ he said. ‘D-N-bloody-A.’

Her spine was chilled, literally: the frost melting through her jumper as he pressed her into the soil. She tried to pray, while at the same time looking to each side of her for a possible weapon.

‘Because this isn’t me, of course,’ he told her. ‘Bishops don’t do this. It’s never considered feasible for a bishop to even contemplate doing this to a woman. A bishop’s whereabouts on the night in question are rarely – even in these suspicious times – ever questioned. Especially… if there’s an unpleasant, arrogant, sociopathic teenager like young James Lyden on the loose. Having been found hiding in the Bishop’s Palace and unceremoniously ejected therefrom by the understandably irate Bishop, he wanders the grounds…’

‘You can’t possibly —’

‘My dear child, you have no idea of the things I’ve got away with… I really do believe I am… protected.’

‘You’re mad. I can’t believe—’ She panicked then, pushing against him, tossing her head from side to side, summoning a scream.

He jammed an arm into her mouth. ‘No,’ he said coldly, his other hand flattening a breast. ‘Not that. Never that.’

Over his shoulder, she could see the Cathedral wall and one of the high, diamond-paned windows – with lights behind. With police, and perhaps a doctor summoned to examine Thomas Dobbs’s body, or an electrician to find out what went wrong earlier? Vergers, canons, all within twenty feet – as the Bishop of Hereford placed his long, sensitive fingers round her throat.

‘You rejected me, Mrs Watkins. On a personal level, that was the most insulting thing of all.’

‘I want to pray,’ she said.

He laughed.

‘Does that really mean nothing to you?’

He took his hands from her throat.

‘I don’t believe in God,’ he said, ‘except as something created by man in what he liked to believe was his image. I don’t believe in Satan. I don’t believe in saints – or demons. I accept the psychological power of symbolism, of costume drama.’

She said, ‘You really don’t see it, do you?’ She squirmed to a sitting position, her back to the fountain. ‘You don’t see what you are!’

He recoiled slightly, puzzled.

‘You don’t realize… that a non-believer who manipulates—’ she struggled to her feet as she spoke, ‘… who manipulates the belief system to promote his own power and influence…’ she snatched the stone pot from the top of the fountain; it was heavier than she expected; she almost let it fall; ‘… is the most satanic … person of all.’

She was sobbing.

‘Put it down,’ the Bishop said.

She managed to raise the pot, with both hands, over her head. She backed on to the path.

Mick relaxed, spread his hands. ‘You going to throw that at me?’

He was about four feet away from her. If she threw it at him with all her strength, he would catch it easily. If she came close enough to try to hit him with it, he would simply take it away from her.