Phil Rickman - Midwinter of the Spirit

‘Just leave the number on the desk. Sophie, could you give me another bit of information?’

‘It’s what I’m here for, Merrily.’

‘Could you tell me exactly where in the Close Canon Dobbs lives?’

Sophie removed her half-glasses. ‘Ho-hum,’ she said.

‘The Bishop’s specific instructions are to keep Dobbs and me well apart, right?’

‘Michael doesn’t discuss Canon Dobbs. Perhaps you could try the telephone directory?’

‘Of which you know he’s ex-.’

Sophie sighed. ‘He moved out of the canonry when his wife died. He lives in a little terraced house in Gwynne Street.’

‘That’s…?’

‘Less than fifty yards from where I sit – just down from the Christian bookshop. And I didn’t tell you that.’

‘Thank you.’

‘I suppose you had to get this over at some stage.’ Sophie refixed her glasses. ‘Don’t forget your haunting, will you?’

Frost-blackened plants dripped down the sides of a hanging basket next to the door. The green door needed painting. Paint was peeling from the wooden window ledge; the wood was rotting. The house itself rather let Gwynne Street down.

The street was narrow, almost like an alley, following the perimeter wall of the Bishop’s Palace, and sloping downhill towards the river. The house was one of the lower ones, before they gave way to warehouses and garages near the banks of the Wye.

There was no bell, no knocker. Merrily banged on the door with a fist, which hurt and brought more paint flying off.

There was no answer. She peered in at the window. The curtains were drawn against her. She looked around in frustration. There was no sign of another way in. Above her, the sky was tight and dark-flecked like stretched goatskin.

‘Hello, Merrily. All right, luv?’

‘I don’t really know.’

‘Oh.’ Silence on the line as Huw Owen mulled this over. ‘That sounds like you took on the job. I thought you wouldn’t back out.’

‘I was actually about to turn it down.’ Merrily lit a cigarette, looking out of the window into the Bishop’s Palace yard. ‘Then a case happened.’

‘Just happened, eh?’ Huw said. ‘Just like that. Well, what’s done’s done, in’t it? How can I help?’

‘I don’t suppose any of the others’ve called. Charlie? Clive?’

‘Never off, lass. “Do excuse me bothering you again, Huw, but I have a teensy problem, and I’m not entirely sure if it’s a weeper or a breather .” ’

Merrily blew an accidental smoke-ring. ‘So I’m the first to come crying to the headmaster.’

‘I always liked you the best, anyroad, luv. Charlie and Clive’ll fall on their arses sooner or later, but they won’t tell me .’

She started to laugh, picturing him sitting placidly in his isolated, Brontë-esque rectory, like some ungroomed old wolfhound.

‘Let’s hear it then, lass.’

She told him about Denzil Joy. She told it simply and concisely. She missed out nothing she thought might be important. Scritchscratch . And then the Dobbs link. It took over fifteen minutes, and it brought everything back, and she felt unclean again.

‘My,’ Huw said, ‘that’s a foxy one, in’t it?’

‘What d’you think?’

‘Could be a few things. Could be just a very nasty little man. Or it could be a carrier .’

‘A carrier. Did you tell us about carriers?’

‘Happen I forgot.’

‘Meaning you deliberately forgot. Would carriers be the people who pick up hitchhikers ?’

‘You’re not daft, Merrily. I said that, din’t I? Provable carriers are… not that common. And not easy to diagnose. And they can lead to a lot of hysteria of the fundamentalist type. You know, if one bloke’s got it, it must be contagious? And then you get these dubious mass-exorcisms, everybody rolling around and clutching their guts.’

‘Just one man,’ Merrily said, ‘so far.’

‘That’s good to know. Well, a carrier is usually a nasty person who attracts more nastiness to him – like iron filings to a magnet. Usually there’s a bit of a sexual kink. An overly powerful sex-drive and probably not bright. Not a lot up top, too much down below.’

‘Anything I need to do now he’s gone?’

‘To make sure he don’t come back? Sounds like Mr Dobbs has done it. Not going quietly into that good night, is he?’

‘Clearly not.’

‘Might not work, mind. That’s the big irony with Deliverance – half the time it don’t work. But in somewhere like a hospital it’ll fade or get consumed by all the rest of the pervading anguish. You could happen do a protection on yourself periodically. Oh, and leave off sex for a week.’

‘Gosh, Huw, that’s going to be a tall order.’

‘Oh dear,’ Huw said. ‘So you’re still on your own, eh? What a bloody waste. God hates waste.’

Before lunch, Merrily made an appointment to meet Mrs Susan Thorpe at the Glades Residential Home at eleven o’clock the following morning. There must have been somebody in the room who didn’t know about this issue, because Mrs Thorpe kept addressing her as if she were Rentokil coming to deal with an infestation of woodworm.

Sophie was meeting a friend for lunch at the Green Dragon. Merrily decided to see what was on offer at the café inside All Saints Church: a fairly ingenious idea for getting bums on pews or at least close to pews.

But first – Sod it, I’m not walking away from this – she slipped round the wall and back into Gwynne Street.

There was a weak, cream-coloured sun now over Broad Street, but Gwynne Street was still in shadow. The only point of light was in the middle of Dobbs’s flaking green door.

It turned out to be a slender white envelope trapped by a corner in the letterbox flap. As she raised a fist to knock on the door and wondered if she ought to push the envelope through, she saw the name typed on the front:

Mrs M Watkins

She caught a movement at an upstairs window and glanced up, saw a curtain quiver. He was there! The old bastard had been in the whole time. He’d watched her standing here knocking more paint from his door.

And now he’d left her a letter.

The street was deserted: no cars, no people, no voices. She felt like smashing Dobbs’s window. Instead she snatched the envelope out of the box and walked away and didn’t look back.

She walked quickly out of Gwynne Street, past the Christian bookshop and the Tourist Information Shop, and round the corner into King Street, where she stood at the kerb and tore open the envelope. She hoped it was a threat, something abusive.

There was a single sheet of notepaper folded inside. In the centre, a single line of type:

The first exorcist was Jesus Christ.

This was all it said.

THE WOMAN BEHIND the counter was, by any standards, dropdead gorgeous. Worse still, kind of pale and mysterious and distant, with hair you could trip over.

A woollen scarf masking her lower face, Jane watched from outside the shop window. Saturday morning: bright enough to bring thousands of shoppers into Hereford from all over the county and from large areas of Wales; cold enough for there still to be condensation on the windows, even in sheltered Church Street.

Jane had come in on the early bus, the only bus out of Ledwardine on a Saturday. At half-twelve, Rowenna was picking her up outside the Library. It was Psychic Fair day.

Which left her a couple of hours to kill. It was inevitable she’d wind up here at some point.

She almost wished she hadn’t; this was so awful. Lol had written songs about creatures like this. And now he lived above the same shop. Maybe during the lunch hour the woman would weave her languorous way up some archaic spiral staircase, and he’d be waiting for her up on the landing, where they’d start undressing each other before making their frenzied…