‘What are you doing?’ Lol said.
THE CLUSTER OF candles on a small tray on the floor lit up her face like some Renaissance Madonna’s over a glowing crib.
She was sitting with her back to the wall directly below one of the corner stone pinnacles, its conical, notched prong sharp against the last amber in the west.
The pole bearing the weathercock sprouted from the apex of a leaded pyramid that occupied most of this small platform in the sky, a duckboarded walkway around it. It felt isolated, scary if you didn’t like heights, which Lol didn’t, but the gathering of candlelight against the glistening backcloth of new night made it weirdly intimate.
‘Who the fuck are you?’ Belladonna said.
She was wearing a long blue stockman’s coat, hanging open over something light-coloured.
Two hundreds steps did something unprecedented to the backs of your calves. Lol set the lantern down on the deck and sat down behind it, the two of them facing one another across the width of the tower.
‘If you wanted to be alone,’ he said, ‘you shouldn’t have gone walking around the battlements with your candles when everyone knows the church is closed.’
‘I’m not alone.’
‘You… been up here long?’
‘Stopped counting the chimes a while ago. Came in with the tourists, decided not to leave. I asked you a question.’
‘Lol. Lol Robinson,’ Lol said.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I see.’
‘We almost met once, at a festival. You wouldn’t remember. It wasn’t Glastonbury or anything…’
‘I’m not in the mood for reminiscence,’ Bell said. ‘Go away.’
The half-dozen stubby candles on the tray had probably been taken from the votive table in the church. In their glow, her face looked moist and quietly radiant. She hadn’t changed much, really. The lines seemed to have added movement, vibrancy. Lol felt an electric curiosity and the need to exercise it, as if the Saltash episode had freed him up for this. Do something .
Whatever she’d done, he didn’t want her to be insane.
‘You shouldn’t be alone,’ he said. ‘Not now.’
‘I’m not alone, I told you that.’
‘But they can’t talk to you.’
‘I can talk to them.’
‘They don’t listen,’ Lol said. ‘They don’t care.’
Merrily had said, She’ll be in a bad way. There’s only one reason she’s gone up there. If the police go up to try and bring her down, she won’t even wait for them to reach the top. Can you get that over to them?
‘Is she with you?’ Bell said. ‘Your girlfriend.’
‘No. She’s in the castle.’
‘Has she done it yet?’
Did she mean Sam? He didn’t reply.
‘It’s a gesture,’ Bell said. ‘A meaningless gesture. She’s wasting her time. What’s here’s too powerful.’
He realized that she must mean the exorcism. Maybe she didn’t know about Sam.
He saw that each of the stone pinnacles was tipped with a tiny cross. ‘But this is the centre of it, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘This is the soul of the town. The point of…’
‘Transition.’
‘I’m not sure what you mean by that. Would it… would you mind if I stood up? I think I can feel a bit of a cramp coming on.’
‘As long as you don’t come near me,’ Belladonna said.
‘Sure.’
Tell them to keep right away from her, Merrily had said. She might still have the knife.
This was after he’d reminded her that he couldn’t stand heights. She’d been worried about walking away from this. He’d told her he’d stay in the church and try and explain to the police if they showed up. Holding one another for a few seconds and then she’d walked away, kept looking back.
There was, of course, no reason the police would think Bell or anyone was up here, now the tray of candles was in the shadow of the walls.
Lol looked over the battlements once before turning away. Lights were coming on all around the church. When he turned his head, it was like a Catherine wheel, dizzying. He caught a thin, sharp smell from somewhere.
‘One hundred and thirty-five feet,’ Bell said. ‘I watched the police cars converging on Jonathan’s shop. Did you find him?’
‘Merrily and the Mayor. After the ironmonger told them his shop hadn’t been open all day.’
‘Garrulous old fool.’
‘She… what can I say about this?’
‘Rage gives you unlimited strength,’ Bell said.
He guessed she’d raised her voice to deal with the tremor, but it was there.
‘What had he done to you?’
‘I don’t have to answer your questions.’
‘No.’ He looked over the town to where arrows of pale pink were enfolded in a cloud bank over Clee Hill in the east. ‘I was talking to a couple of people about you. Tom Storey?’
‘How is he?’
‘Still working. Still a bit scary.’
Bell laughed. ‘He was always scared of me.’ She turned to look up at Lol. ‘Why aren’t you? What do you want?’
‘I’m just scared of what you might do. That is what you meant by the point of transition, isn’t it?’
She didn’t reply. He felt the hours she’d been up here had been spent coming down from something, some wild and terrifying trip she couldn’t quite believe she’d made.
‘You knew about Scole’s parents, I suppose. How they died?’
A pause, then she sighed.
‘You mean his adoptive parents? Or his parents?’
He stared at her. She was watching a distant plane, barely audible, crossing a clear patch of night sky like a firefly.
‘Jonathan’s father was a man called Eric Bryers,’ she said.
Lol gripped one of the battlements.
‘Bloody junkie tracked him down,’ Bell said. ‘Vindictive little smackhead bastard.’
‘But…’
He watched the plane disappear into cloud, emerge the other side. There were two versions of this story. Moira Cairns had told him the baby had died. It was Tom who’d maintained she’d given up the child for adoption on learning she had a recording contract.
But Tom was neurotic – his version had been the least likely.
‘Scole was your son?’
‘Eric tracked him down a couple of years ago, not long before he died.’ Bell pulled her coat across her knees and gazed into the mesh of candlelight. ‘The revelation rather altered Jonathan’s view of himself. Or, I suppose, he would have said it confirmed what he’d always felt. His adoptive parents were working the clock round in their seedy little greasy spoon and just wanted a son who’d take over the business – perhaps buy another greasy spoon – so they could retire to Morecambe or some other windswept purgatory. Sent him to college to learn business studies. All desperately short of glamour. He hated it. Thought he’d been born for better.’
‘Especially when he found out who his mother was, I imagine,’ Lol said. ‘And what his mother had… denied him.’
‘Oh yes, he hated me. And presumably Eric filled him up with bile before he… did what he did.’
‘Jumped from a high building.’
‘You ever work with Eric, Lol?’
‘Never.’
‘I saw him last when he came back to play bass on my determinedly faithful version of “Gloomy Sunday”. I was told he carried a copy with him everywhere, like a form of temptation.’ Bell laughed, far back in her throat. ‘Like a secret agent with a poison capsule. But, of course, that’s the sort of person Eric was. Jonathan wouldn’t have known that.’
‘Not a lot to discover on the Internet about Eric, I suppose. Not like you. That would’ve been a serious voyage of discovery.’
Cuttings everywhere, Merrily had said, face twisting at the images in her head. Papers, fanzines, website printouts… scattered over his body like some kind of sick confetti.
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