Phil Rickman - Midwinter of the Spirit

His eyes caught the full moon. His eyes were at their wildest; she sensed enjoyment, a need to be at all times very close to the edge.

He shrugged.

‘I was going to let you pray. I was going to let you kneel and pray. I accept the level of your faith. Very well, I’ll use that pot, if you like. You can kneel and pray and, while you’re talking to God, I can bring it down very hard, very cleanly, on the back of your head. Bargain?’

Her arms were aching, but she kept the pot raised, like an offering to the moon.

‘It distresses me that you have to die,’ Mick Hunter said. ‘The way it’s turned out with you, that leaves me sad. I do want you to know that I’m capable of feeling real distress.’

He walked towards her with his arms outstretched.

‘Merrily?’

There was nothing more to say. She arched her back, feeling a momentary acute pain in her spine, and hurled the stone pot into the great gothic diamond-paned window.

YOU COULD SEE him sliding it into her. It was quite dark, but the camera came in close, and there was the beam of a torch or lamp on their fuzzy, shadowed loins. Candles wavered out of focus, balls of light in the background. You could make out the glimmer of a gothic window. Beneath the woman’s buttocks was what might have been an altar-cloth.

‘Is that him?’ Annie Howe asked. ‘Is it as simple as this?’

They knew from his parents that, for a period during his time at Oxford, he’d had long hair – though it was not fashionable at the time – and also a beard. But there seemed to be no actual pictures of him from those days.

‘It could be him,’ Merrily said. ‘Then, again…’

‘You going to invite his wife to look at this?’ Huw wondered.

‘If necessary,’ Howe said. ‘I’m advised it may not be entirely politic at this stage to expose a bishop’s wife to pornography, and ask her if she recognizes her husband. She’s coming back this afternoon from her parents’ house in Gloucestershire. I’ve already spoken to her on the phone, and she didn’t seem as shocked as she might be. Any reason for that?’

‘It’s a marriage,’ Merrily said, ‘and maybe a political marriage, at that. Put it this way, their kids go to boarding school, and Val seems to spend a lot of time away from home.’

‘Interesting,’ Howe said.

Her office at headquarters was no surprise. Minimalist was the word; the TV and video looked like serious clutter. Merrily found this calming for once; there were no layers here. She wondered if she dared light a cigarette. Perhaps not. Beyond the big window, the sky was grey and calm: one of those un-Christmassy mild days which so often precede Christmas.

‘All right.’ Howe stopped Paul Sayer’s tape and rewound it. ‘Let’s look at it one more time.’

‘Actually,’ Lol said, ‘that woman… Could I look at the woman?’

Howe glanced at him with tilted head, and set the tape rolling again.

The woman on the possible-altar wore a blindfold and a gag, but the more times you watched the scene, the less it seemed like rape. Too smooth. She was ready , Merrily thought.

‘It’s Anna Purefoy.’ Lol leaned forward from the plastic chair next to Merrily’s.

‘Are you sure?’ Howe asked him. ‘This woman looks quite young. I’m told the film could be twenty years old. I thought we might be looking at the very early days of home-video, but my sergeant suggests it was transferred from something called Super Eight cine-film. Even so, Anna would have been in her late thirties, early forties.’

‘It’s her,’ Lol insisted.

‘Aye, they like to take care of themselves.’ Huw Owen was occupying a corner of Howe’s desk. He was the untidiest object in the immaculate room.

‘I’m sorry, Mr Owen?’

‘Secret of eternal youth, lass – sometimes you’d think they’d found it. Then they’ll go suddenly to seed, or become gross like Crowley. Drugs were no help, mind, in his case.’

Howe stood with her back to the window. She appeared, for some reason, uncharmed at being addressed as ‘lass’.

‘Well, it’s clear that this tape is never going to be usable in evidence, even if we could put our hands on the original. But it does prompt speculation. Would you like to speculate for us, Mr Owen?’

‘I get the feeling you were at university,’ Huw said. ‘Did they have any kind of occult society at your place?’

‘There were a hundred different societies, but I was never a joiner.’

‘I can imagine,’ Huw said. ‘Well, you look at most universities, you’ll find some kind of experimental mystical group – harmless enough in most cases, but one association leads to another.’

Merrily said, ‘I have a problem with that. I can’t see Mick having any interest at all in mysticism.’

‘Happen a reaction against his solid clergy family?’

‘His reaction, then, would be to avoid any kind of religious experience.’

‘My knowledge of theology is limited,’ Howe said, ‘but what we’ve just been watching is not what I would immediately think of as religious.’

‘No,’ Merrily said, ‘it’s plain sex. If you’re looking for serious motivating forces in Mick’s life, you’d have to put sex close to the top. He’d be nineteen or twenty then, newly liberated from the bosom of what was probably a less-than-liberal family. Suppose he thought he was getting involved with people who could, I don’t know, extend his experience in all kinds of interesting ways.’

‘Very astute, lass.’ Huw patted her shoulder. ‘As you’ve been finding out, clergy and the children of clergy are always fair game.’

‘Yes.’

‘So we’ve got a lad from a high-placed clergy family, up at Oxford. What was he reading?’

‘History,’ Howe said, ‘and politics.’

‘He could have become anything,’ Merrily said, ‘yet winds up following his father into the Church. You just can’t see him as a curate, somehow.’ She looked up at Howe. ‘It’s like imagining Annie here directing traffic.’

Howe scowled.

‘That’s interesting,’ Huw said. ‘Why did he do it? You really want me to develop a theory, Inspector?’

‘Go ahead.’

‘All right. You’ve got this smart, handsome lad from a dogcollar dynasty, putting it around Oxford like a sailor on shoreleave. And he’s drawn into summat – drawn in, to put it crudely, by his dick. He’s having the time of his life – the best time ever. He doesn’t see the little rat eyes in the dark.’

‘Meaning what, Mr Owen?’

‘There is a network. It might not put out a monthly newsletter, but it does exist. The general aim is anti-Christian. They might be several different groups, but that’s their one rallying point – the destruction of the Christian Church.’

‘I’d have thought,’ Howe said drily, ‘that they could simply sit back and watch the Church take itself apart.’

‘She’s got a point,’ Merrily said, the need for a cigarette starting to tell.

‘Merrily, lass, you’d be very naive if you thought the Church’s problems were entirely self-generated.’

‘Sorry, go on.’

“They’ve got a good intelligence network, the rat-eyes. The Internet now, more primitive then but, just like Moscow was head-hunting at Oxford and Cambridge in the sixties, the rateyes had their antennae out.’

Lol said, ‘Anna Purefoy was in Oxfordshire then. She worked for the county council. She’d been fired from the MOD after some fundamentalist junior minister found out she was involved in magic, along with a few other people – a purge.’

‘Part of the honey-trap then,’ Huw said. ‘Beautiful, experienced older woman. Aye, I think we can rule out rape in them pictures. Happen she said she enjoyed being tied up. If that is Hunter, it’s an interesting connection, but I’d be looking for something harder. Suppose they stitched our lad up good? Suppose they had him full of drugs, and suppose he really did rape somebody – a young girl, say. Suppose they even arranged for him to kill somebody.’