Phil Rickman - Midwinter of the Spirit

Exactly? Lol felt cold inside.

‘That stone trough… it was where the bath is now, I’d swear to it. They probably used the same holes for the fucking pipes. And the sword – that fucking sword, man! I want to scream . It is not possible.’

‘She said she dug it up.’

‘Where?’

‘Just outside. Somebody had been trying to dig a pond and given up and she saw this thing sticking out where the ground had been excavated. Unless she knew all the time about what your father really did, there’s no way she would have just found this thing and made that connection.’

‘Nooo!’ Denny leapt up, threw his cigarette on to the hearth. ‘You don’t understand, do you? The police… after the inquest, they asked if we wanted it back: the fucking family heirloom. The thing he’d specially sharpened on the old scythe stone, so it’d go through f… flesh… and veins, without much sawing.’

Lol thought about the blackened relic. She must have sharpened that too. Must have honed the edge, testing it on her thumb maybe – rehearsing. You didn’t slash your wrists sideways, you cut upwards into the vein – a fellow patient in the psychiatric hospital had told Lol that. And warm water to prevent muscle cramps and stop the blood clotting. Dreamy, otherworldly, unstable Moon hadn’t done a thing wrong.

‘Police said what did we wanna do with it – this valuable antique. So I took it. Ma was in no state at the time, never would be again, so I took it. Ma signs for it, never knew what she was signing for. I was sixteen by then – big man taking charge. I knew what to do with it. I wrapped it up in some newspaper, stuffed it in my bike bag – brought it up here, back to the old farm. Come up on the bike early one morning, and buried the fucker.’

‘ You buried it?’

‘And then, many years later, my poor little mental sister comes along and digs it up – the same blade.’ Denny hissed, ‘It defies fucking belief .’

‘You don’t know that.’ Lol leapt up aghast. ‘You can’t possibly know that.’

‘Don’t know it? It was on our wall for… I dunno, for centuries. That’s why I knew Kathy wasn’t talking total crap about us being in this direct line to the old Celtic village. My grandad, when I was little, he told me that artefact’d been in the family for two thousand years. Sounds balls, don’t it? What family’s been two thousand years in the same spot?’

‘Where did you bury it?’

‘In the shit.’ A short, bitter laugh. ‘There was this kind of slurry pit in front of here in those days. I dug down to the bottom of it. I put the sword in the shit.’

It all fitted so well. Perhaps the Purefoys or their predecessors had found the old pit, thought it was the site of a pond, so dug down – and when no water came up, they abandoned it. It all fitted so horribly well.

‘You tell the police it was the same sword?’

‘They never asked. They knew she’d dug up all this stuff. Far as they’re concerned she was just obsessed with Dad’s suicide. They’re not connecting it beyond an obsession. If you were the police, would you wanner know all this shit about the ancestors? Would you want a hint of anything…’ Denny drew breath and bit his lower lip. ‘Anything paranormal?’

‘You think that?’

‘Sometimes,’ Denny said, ‘it’s the least complicated option.’

‘She said it was telling her things,’ Lol said. ‘She wouldn’t even let me touch it. She said she didn’t want the flow blocked by anyone else’s vibrations.’

‘Madness,’ Denny said. ‘Let’s just call it madness.’

Lol stood up and moved to the window, looked down into Capuchin Lane, snow now in rags against the house walls after a day of shoppers’ shoes. ‘She just wanted to think she was in… almost physical contact with her ancestors.’

‘She’s with the primitive fuckers now,’ Denny said sourly.

THE DAY AFTER tomorrow it would be December. Amidst frozen fields, the Church of St Cosmas and St Damien, a small candleshimmer behind its leaded windows, looked peaceful in a humble-stable-at-Bethlehem way. Or so she told herself.

Another attempt to dispel the fear.

Always make time to prepare , Huw would say. All the time she’d made, she’d blown.

An hour fending off Ted Clowes, who saw himself as her lay-supervisor, who was always credited with getting Merrily the Ledwardine living – to ease the worries of her mother, his sister in Cheltenham who was convinced that it was only a matter of time before any female curate in Liverpool was found raped and battered in the churchyard.

Ted would also dump her without a qualm if anything began reflecting badly on himself.

‘I think,’ he’d told her before they finally parted tonight, ‘that this parish is beginning to realize precisely where it stands with you, Merrily.’

And she knew that this time he’d cause trouble. Perhaps a discreet call to the Archdeacon, a question at the parish council which would be recorded in the minutes.

It had left her less than an hour to see to the blessing and bottling of the water and to explain to Jane where she was going and why Jane, who would be more than a bit interested, could not come. The truth was, if there was anything in there, she didn’t want Jane exposed to it. Kids her age were easy prey. It might even have been kids Jane’s age who were behind the desecration.

But Jane seemed unconcerned, said that was OK, as she was going out anyway, to see a movie in Hereford with Rowenna.

Hardly for the first time, as she parked the Volvo at the side of the track next to a Suzuki four-wheel drive and a muddied Mondeo, Merrily wondered why Jane did not have a boyfriend.

She went round the boot to fetch her case, containing the Bibles, the prayer books, the rites of blessing and lesser exorcism that she’d hand-copied on to cards, and the holy water. She was freezing. She’d changed into her vestments before leaving, so now she put on her cowled clerical cloak of heavyweight loden, but it did nothing for the cold inside.

Lights shone from the cottages. The church, however, was in darkness, no candlelight visible from this side.

She saw figures waiting for her at the edge of the churchyard.

‘DS Bliss.’ He shone a torch upwards to his own ginger-topped face. ‘Franny Bliss.’ Merseyside accent. ‘I’m a Catholic. You all right with that, Vicar?’

‘That’s… fine. I’m Merrily.’

‘I know. Seen your piccy in the local rag. This big yobbo’s PC Dave Jones. Nonconformist, him. What was that bloody chapel of yours again, Dave?’

‘Pisgah, sarge. Pisgah Chapel.’ PC Jones was in plain clothes: dark anorak and a flat cap. ‘Not been back in years, mind.’

‘I just love to hear him say it,’ Bliss said. ‘Now, just so’s you know, Merrily, we’ve gor another lad hanging out by the farm. We don’t talk about him – many years lapsed. That’s why he gets to stay in the cold. Anyway, we’re the best the DCI could put together in the time. Where do you want us?’

‘I don’t know how you want to handle it.’ Merrily stood on the parapet surrounding the churchyard, looking out at the bare fields gleaming silver under a sizable moon. The wind plucked at her cloak. ‘This could be a wild-goose chase for you.’

‘Like most of our nights, that is,’ said bulky Dave.

Merrily gathered the cloak around her. She was scared – and had been since changing into her priestly things. Under her cloak, the cassock had begun to feel clammy, the surplice stiff.

‘For a start, who else knows about this?’ Franny Bliss asked.

‘Well, I told Major Weston, and made a courtesy call to my colleague at Dilwyn. Left a message on his machine, anyway. I also rang the farm here and got the numbers of about half a dozen people living in the area, giving them the opportunity to come along if they felt strongly about it.’