Phil Rickman - Midwinter of the Spirit

‘Jane?’

Damn. He must have come out of a side entrance. She must remain cool, show no surprise.

‘So that’s her, is it, Lol?’

‘Who?’

He was shivering in his thin, faded sweatshirt. His hair needed attention; it had never looked the same since he’d cut it off at the back and lost the ponytail. Made him look too grownup, almost like a man of thirty-eight.

‘Moon?’ Jane lowered her scarf. Inside the shop, the woman saw them looking at her and smiled absently, arranging a display of CDs on the counter. ‘She’s quite ordinary-looking, isn’t she?’

‘Almost plain,’ Lol said. ‘Jane, how much would it cost to make you go away and stop embarrassing me?’

‘More than you’ve got on you. Much more.’

‘How about a cappuccino?’

‘Yeah, that’ll do,’ Jane said.

It was set in deep countryside, a kind of manor house, rambling but not very old, maybe early nineteenth-century. Squat gateposts with plain stone balls on top, and a notice in the entrance – THE GLADES RESIDENTIAL HOME – stencilled over a painted purple hill with the sun above it. A bright yellow sun with no suggestion of it setting, which would have been the wrong image altogether.

There was a small car park in front, with a sweeping view of the Radnor hills, but a woman appeared around the side of the house and beckoned her to drive closer to her.

Merrily followed the drive around to a brick double-garage and parked in front of it, the woman hurrying after her.

‘You’re wearing your… uniform,’ she said in a loud, dismayed whisper, when Merrily got out of the car. ‘I’m sorry, I should have emphasized the need for discretion.’

Merrily smiled. ‘Don’t worry about that.’ Don’t worry yet; we may not even paste your case on the Deliverance website .

‘It’s all been very difficult,’ the woman said. ‘We didn’t want to call in the local vicar – far too close – so the obvious person was Mr Dobbs, but then… such a bombshell – we won’t talk about that. I’m Susan Thorpe. We’ll go in this way.’

She was a big woman, dark blonde hair pushed under a wide, practical hairslide. She led Merrily through a small back door, down a short drab passage and into what was clearly her private sitting room: very untidy.

‘Have a seat. Throw those magazines on the floor. I’ve sent for some coffee, is that all right? God, I didn’t need this, I really didn’t need this. Everything comes at once, don’t you find that? Now I discover I have to find a room for my mother.’

‘Must be a problem, if you run a home like this and your mother gets to the age—’

‘Oh, it’s not like that. Mother’s fitter than me. She’s lost her job, that’s all, and her home – she was someone’s housekeeper. I’m sorry, I’m afraid I’ve forgotten your name.’

‘Merrily Watkins.’

‘Merrily. And you’re the new diocesan exorcist. I was in quite a quandary, Merrily, so I rang the Diocese. I said, “Could you send anybody but Dobbs.” ’

Dobbs? Merrily still had his one-liner in her bag: The first exorcist was Jesus Christ . Hence, Jesus must be our role model, and Jesus was not a woman. ‘Why didn’t you want Canon Dobbs?’

‘This problem… I was very loath at first to think it was a problem – your kind of problem, anyway. Old people can be such delinquents . They’ll break a teapot because they don’t like the colour, wet the bed because they don’t like the sheets.’

‘This is a volatile … er, poltergeist phenomenon?’

‘Oh no, the point I was making is that, when one of the staff complains of strange things happening, I immediately suspect one or other of the residents. In this case, neither I nor – so far, thank God – any of the residents have seen or heard a thing.’

‘So who has?’ Merrily still hadn’t received an answer to her question about Dobbs. Was this another of his set-ups, another attempt to show her why she, as a woman, was unfit to follow in the footsteps of Jesus?

‘Chambermaids,’ said Mrs Thorpe. ‘Well, domestic careworkers, actually, but we do try to make it seem like a hotel for the sake of the residents, so we call them chambermaids. The other week, one simply gave in her notice – or rather sent it by post, having failed to return after a weekend away. Gave no explanation other than “personal reasons”. It was only then that my assistant manager told me the woman had rushed downstairs one evening white as a sheet and said she wasn’t going up there again.’

‘Where?’

‘To the third floor.’

Merrily tensed, thinking of her own third-floor problem, currently in remission, at the vicarage. ‘Did she elaborate?’

‘No, as I say, she simply left and we thought no more about it and took on a replacement, a local woman who didn’t want to live in but was prepared to work nights. Well, at least she couldn’t just bugger off without an explanation.’

‘She’s had the same experience?’

‘We presume it was the same. Do you want to talk to her?’

‘If that’s possible.’

‘She’ll be coming in with the coffee in a minute.’ Mrs Thorpe pulled a half-crushed cigarette packet from between the sofa cushions. ‘Does smoke interfere with whatever it is you do?’

‘I hope not. Have one of mine.’

‘I’m terrible sorry – with all the persecution these days, one assumes other people don’t smoke. Have you met Canon Dobbs?’

‘Kind of.’

‘He’s going out of his mind, you know.’

‘Oh?’

‘Always been a very, very strange man, but it’s been downhill all the way for the past year. The man ought to be in a… well, a place like this, I suppose. Not this one, though.’

‘So you know him quite well then.’

Susan Thorpe lit up and coughed fiercely. ‘Sorry, thought I told you: my mother was his housekeeper.’

‘Dobbs’s housekeeper? In Hereford?’

‘For five years. When his wife died he moved out of his canonry with about twenty thousand books. Bought two houses in a nearby terrace, one for the housekeeper – and more books, of course.’

‘This is in Gwynne Street?’

‘That’s it. Quite a nice place to live if you like cities. Mother rather wondered if he might do the decent thing and leave it to her when he shuffled off his mortal coil, but then, a couple of days ago, absolutely out of the blue, he just tells her to go, leave. Gives her five thousand quid and instructions to be out by the weekend – that’s today. “Why?” she says, utterly dumbfounded. “What have I done to you?” “Nothing,” he says. “Don’t ask questions, just leave, and thank you very much.” What d’you make of that?’

‘Weird,’ Merrily said. ‘I—’

I don’t understand… What have I been doing wrong? She heard the words, with their long, cathedral echo, saw a woman of about sixty, distressed, walking away in her sensible boots, her tweed coat, her…

‘Mrs Thorpe, does your mother ever wear a green velvet hat, sort of Tudor-looking?’

Go away. Go away , Canon Dobbs had hissed. I can’t possibly discuss this here .

Oh my God , Jane thought. They are. They really are. An item!

In the corner café, she and Lol had a slab of chocolate fudge cake each, which they had to take turns in forking up because the table had one leg shorter than the other three.

‘So, like, this is serious, right? You and Moon.’

‘We’re just…’

‘Good friends?’

‘Kind of.’ He seemed uncomfortable discussing Moon. She must be a good ten years younger. Not that that mattered, of course. Jane was a good twenty years younger than Lol, and she quite…