by Phil Rickman
And hops, of course. The scent of hops was unavoidable in this place.
In a white waistcoat and a spotted silk scarf which, Merrily recalled from childhood, was called a diklo, Al had welcomed her with a small bow and a kiss on the hand. Now he was moving around the workshop, picking up guitar fragments and gently putting them down. A sign down by the road had said: MUSEUM CLOSED ALL DAY.
They were still waiting for Simon St John.
‘What do you want me to do?’ Merrily asked Al. ‘I’m afraid I don’t really have as much time as I’d have liked.’ She’d told him as much as she needed to of what had happened after she and Lol had left Knight’s Frome last night. ‘And I’ll need to be there, obviously, when the police come to talk to Jane.’ Al was nodding, but she could tell he was somewhere else.
Jane might sleep for hours yet, Eirion had kept insisting. You go. I can tell this is important. And when she comes down we’ve got a lot to talk about, haven’t we?
At least it wasn’t far; she could be back in just over half an hour, if necessary. If they could hold off the police until this afternoon, that would help. She’d already called Mumford, asked if this was possible. Mumford had said, We’ve found a knife, by the way.
Al was still nodding his goblin chin. ‘By one o’clock, it should be over. By one, we’ll have done all we can do.’
‘But are we trying for the same thing?’
‘To bring her into the light,’ Al said.
‘But is it the same light?’
‘Light is light, drukerimaskri. You know that.’
‘I suppose.’ She didn’t even know if he was a Christian. ‘Where’s Sally?’
‘Gone for a walk. Coming to terms.’
‘How happy is she – about what you’re proposing?’
‘Ah…’ He picked up an unstained guitar neck, only half fretted, held it up to one eye and looked along it. ‘Well, she thinks we should have acted on this when we first suspected something was arising. I tried. I talked to Stock, way back. Told him to sell the place to Lake, take his wife away from here.’
‘Did you?’
‘Ah, but Stock’s patting me on the shoulder, patronizing, like I’m this colourful old rural character. Perhaps I should’ve had more patience with Stock, told him I was Boswell the guitar-maker, but I didn’t want him to know. Consequently, perhaps, I don’t suppose he believed a word I was telling him.’
‘He must have believed something in the end. He went to Simon St John. And then he came to me.’
‘Poor Simon, he doesn’t want to do this, even now. He’s afraid for himself, and for his wife. He’s afraid of what he might bring down on his wife.’
Merrily didn’t quite understand, but it was clear that nobody seemed to be entirely happy about this, perhaps not even Al himself.
‘Then why today?’ she asked him. ‘Why the hurry?’
‘It’s not a hurry for me, drukerimaskri.’ He put down the guitar neck. ‘I’ve had years to prepare.’
‘Why you?’
‘Because I’m the only Romany left. And because it’s always been my responsibility.’
‘Why?’
Al peered around the workshop, as if to record every detail in his mind. As if to hold a memory of it.
‘I think Simon’s here,’ he said.
The address Frannie Bliss had given him proved to be a three-storey Victorian terrace on the main road out of Leominster. Lol parked the Astra half on the pavement, from where he could see the numbers on the front doors.
The man he was looking for lived in the ground-floor flat at the far end of the terrace, but he owned the whole building, Bliss had emphasized, as if this explained something.
Lol sat there for ten minutes, the car slowly turning into a roasting tin around him. He thought about Simon St John, who had once said, This is the country, Lol. In the country, in certain situations, everybody lies. Had Simon himself really been telling the truth this time? Had he genuinely been too scared to attempt to exorcize Stock’s kiln? In which case, why hadn’t he referred it directly to Merrily instead of trying to claim Stock was making it up? Lol concluded that in an irrational situation people acted irrationally. How would Merrily react? Would she help Simon now, despite everything?
Stupid question.
No time for stupid questions.
As Lol got out of the car, the front door at the end of the terrace opened and a man in a light blue suit came out.
Lol stayed close to the Astra. The man didn’t look behind him, or towards Lol, as he walked out of the entrance. Could this actually be the right guy – wide shoulders, stiff white hair? Stop him now? Accost him before he got into his car?
But the man didn’t go to a car. He walked briskly along the pavement. When a woman passed him, he said warmly, ‘How are you, my dear?’ Glanced up into the sky. ‘Make the most of it, it’s due to break today, I hear.’ Rich, rolling local accent.
Lol followed him to where the road widened and you could see a junction with fields beyond. But before that there was a big Safeway supermarket, a commercial palace with a tower, set well back behind its car park. The man almost skipped down the steps towards the supermarket. Lol waited until he’d reached the bottom and was strolling across the car park towards the entrance, before following.
He watched the white-haired man go through the automatic door. Hesitated. Was he supposed to challenge this guy across the fruit counter, maybe block his trolley in one of the aisles?
Lol went through the door, through the porch, past Postman Pat and his black and white cat in their van, and on into the store. He looked from side to side: a dozen or so customers, none of them a man in a blue suit – maybe he’d gone to the Gents’. Lol moved further into the store, uncertain. He felt conspicuous, so he picked up a shopping basket from a stack. He felt hollow. He was hollow. He couldn’t do this.
The voice was very close to his left ear.
‘Looking for me, brother?’
A clock made out of a breadboard with a six-pointed star on it put the time at ten-fifteen a.m.
‘Why noon?’ Merrily asked bluntly.
Simon St John exchanged a glance with Al.
Al was sitting straight-backed on his stool, determinedly defiant, with his hands in the side pockets of his waistcoat. Simon St John, however, looked as wrecked as his jeans.
‘When we travelled,’ Al said, ‘we camped at night, but we always stopped the wagons at noon: the time of no shadows. Do you understand? Noon is the dead moment in time. When the day belongs to the dead – all the energy of the day sucked in. Sometimes, for a fraction of an instant, you can almost see it, like a photograph turned negative. Everything is still, everything – the road, the fields, the sky – belonging to the dead.’
‘He means that noon is the time of the mulo,’ Simon said. ‘The only time you’ll see one by daylight.’
‘No.’ Al tossed a guitar bridge from one hand to the other. ‘In most cases, you won’t see it at all.’
Merrily shrank from the melodrama. The time of no shadows. And yet…
‘You do know, don’t you, that we did the Deliverance in the kiln around midday? Stock wanted me to do it at night. I said, let’s do it now, in the full light of a summer morning. Let’s not make it sinister. You did know that?’
‘And was this when the sulphur came to you?’
‘At midday, yes. Or very close.’
Al glanced at the photograph. ‘She could have had you. You were lucky.’
‘Or protected.’
‘And were you protected in the hop-yard last night?’
Merrily felt herself blush. ‘It happened too quickly.’
‘Lucky,’ Al said.
‘What is she?’ Merrily asked. ‘I need to know. You use these terms – muli. Very sinister. But what are we really talking about?’
Simon St John came over to sit down. He had a glass of water. All three of them were drinking water. No alcohol, no caffeine, not today.
‘
Not quite a ghost,’ Simon said. ‘Not possession either, in the classic sense. You could say it’s a question of borrowing the aura.’
‘Very much a Romany thing,’ Al pointed out. ‘Live lightly and borrow.’
‘But the mulo doesn’t necessarily give back,’ Simon said. He kept rubbing his black-shirted arms as though they were cold.
‘This is true,’ Al accepted.
Simon said, ‘When Shakespeare talked about shuffling off the mortal coil, he was probably close to it. Death appears to be a staggered process – when the body dies, the spirit exists for a while in the aura, the astral body, the corporeal energy field. Its normal procedure, at this stage, is to look for the exit sign and get the hell out.’
‘But if the cycle’s incomplete,’ Al said, ‘if there’s a need for justice, for balance, for satisfaction…’
Merrily thought about it. ‘This is about what’s sometimes called the Second Death isn’t it?’
‘This is about avoiding the Second Death.’ Simon leaned forward. ‘I don’t think it’s common, not in our society. I don’t imagine it’s a common occurrence in the Romany culture either. I think it’s something they’ve tended to blow up out of proportion over the centuries – I bloody hope it is.’
‘It’s an unpleasant state to be in,’ Al said, ‘because the mulo is said to require life-energy to maintain its existence. Hence the term “living dead”. There are tales of a mulo or muli sucking the blood of the living, but’ – he waved a long hand dismissively – ‘it’s all energy. Sexual, mostly. The victim may be the former life-partner – you get tales of people having sex with their dead husbands or wives – or the person held responsible for the sudden death of the subject before their time.’
‘In the stories, they talk of a solid physical presence,’ Simon said. ‘But we prefer dreams, or sexual fantasies.’
‘You’re selling it as psychology?’ Merrily asked, doubtful.
‘It’s all psychology,’ Simon said. ‘That doesn’t make it any less real. It doesn’t make it any less frightening.’ His face was gaunt; it was one of those soft, pale faces which could alternate in seconds between looking youthful and prematurely aged. ‘The thought of Rebekah – or what she may have become – leaves me cold with—I’m sorry.’
Al stood up and walked over to the photograph. ‘It seems to me that our task is to separate the spirit of Rebekah from what’s formed around it. The evil that grows like fungus around hatred and rage. You follow, drukerimaskri?’
‘And lead it to God. To the light.’
‘And the evil,’ Simon said sourly. ‘Where does that go?’
‘My responsibility.’ Al walked to the door. ‘You two probably have Christian things to work out. I’m going to the place. I’m going to talk to my father. Come when you’re ready, you won’t disturb me.’
‘Al…?’ Merrily touched his sleeve.
‘It’ll work out, drukerimaskri.’ He looked again at the picture of the young woman amateurishly pouting at the sun. ‘She’s ripe. She’s swollen. We can’t delay.’
He walked out without looking back.
Councillor Howe said, ‘Small piece of advice, brother Robinson, in case you’re ever called upon to tail anybody again. Nobody comes shopping at a supermarket and parks half a mile away. Just a small point.’
‘Thanks.’ Lol took the two cups of tea off the tray, along with Charlie Howe’s doughnut. This time in the morning, fewer than a quarter of the tables in the supermarket coffee shop were taken. They were sitting at a window table, just up from the creche.
‘I take it this en’t council business, then.’ Charlie Howe’s brown, leathery face was not remotely wary. He bit into his doughnut. Dark, liquid jam spurted. Charlie licked his fingers. ‘And you’re not a newspaperman after my memoirs?’
‘Newspaper, no,’ Lol said. ‘Memoirs, probably.’
‘Cost you, boy.’
‘Bought you a doughnut.’
Charlie smiled. ‘That gets you as far as 1960. Nothing much happened that year, I was still a beat copper.’
‘How about sixty-three?’
‘Young DC, then. Still hadn’t done my first murder. What did you say you did for a living?’
‘Write songs.’
His eyes were deep-sunk in his craggy forehead, like rock-pools. ‘So this’d be ‘The Ballad of Charlie Howe’, then?’
Lol fought the urge to look away, out of the window. ‘How about “The Ballad of Rebekah Smith”?’
Charlie raised an eyebrow. ‘Don’t reckon that’s a song would mean an awful lot to me.’
‘Maybe you’d only be in the last verse,’ Lol said.
Merrily lit a cigarette.
Simon St John eased his stool a few inches further along the bench. ‘You always smoke before an exorcism?’
‘Sounds like that old joke,’ Merrily said. ‘ “Do you always smoke after sex? No, only when…” What did he mean, talk to his father?’
‘His father, the chovihano, dead these twenty years. Didn’t speak to Al for the previous twenty because Al came off the road, married a gaujo. Cardinal sin, punishable by lifelong curse. Sally once told me he and Al have been communicating better in the past three years than the previous forty.’
‘Candidly,’ Merrily said, ‘do you believe that stuff?’
‘Why not? They talk to the ancestors like we try to talk to God. Their own ancestors, not anyone else’s.’
‘What about you?’
‘I have a fairly strict rule. I talk to living people, and I try to listen to God. Anything else I see or hear nowadays, I turn off the fucking set, rapido.’
‘You’re saying you’ve seen and heard more than most of us.’
He laughed.
‘And you’ve had a bad experience, with that?’
‘I’ve had a whole sequence of bad experiences, Mrs Watkins. I’ve had the living shit scared out me. I’ve been afraid for myself, for my friends and – worst of all – for my very dear wife, my soulmate.’
Merrily said cautiously, ‘Israel believes all exorcists should be psychic to a degree. Which I suppose means you could be a lot better at this than me.’
‘He doesn’t, however, say all psychics should be exorcists. Spare a cig?’
‘Sorry, I assumed—’
‘Periodic vices. All my vices have been periodic – the worst kind. Look, my view on suffering is simple: you ask the question, “Is anyone benefiting from this?” If not, don’t fucking suffer.’
‘What about Stock?’
‘We couldn’t help Stock. His only recourse was to get out, and I told him that. Al told him that. But Stock was Stock.’
‘So why this, now?’
‘It’s for Sally.’ Simon lit up, holding the cigarette between finger and thumb, like you’d hold a joint. ‘Sally didn’t want Al doing this on his own.’
‘Why does he have to do it at all?’
‘Ancestral ties. Who else is gonna do it? Al was trained for years in the Romany mysteries and then backed off. Bit like me, really, but I only backed off to a place that looked safe. Nowhere’s really safe, is it? You ready, now?’
‘What are we going to do?’
‘Deal with this stupid bitch, I suppose.’ He went up to the picture of Rebekah Smith.
‘I meant, what are we going to do? Those Christian things.’
Simon turned back to Merrily. ‘You ever sleep with Lol?’
‘No.’
‘Poor sod puts you on a pedestal. He thinks you’re a much better person than he is, purer, holier. You’re going to have to make all the running, I fear.’
‘People tend to underestimate Lol,’ Merrily said. ‘Where is he, anyway? I’d somehow expected him to be here.’
‘Nah, this is a priest thing. He drove off somewhere.’
She stiffened. ‘Where?’
He shook his head. ‘Don’t worry about it.’ He had another deep drag on his cigarette. ‘Anyway, I’m very grateful to you for coming.’
&nb
sp; ‘I’m sure you are, Simon.’
‘Meaning what?’
‘It’s a set-up, isn’t it? For instance, why can’t you and Al do this on your own?’
‘Maybe we could.’
‘No, you bloody couldn’t,’ Merrily said, ‘because you need a woman. Because of the nature of it, there has to be a woman, doesn’t there? It’s a female entity, so it needs a woman’s energy, a woman’s aura. Poor Stephanie underlined that. And who else? Who else before Stephie?’
Simon’s eyes didn’t move. ‘OK, I suspect there was some similar impact on the second Mrs Conrad Lake, Adam’s mother. But she was wise enough to get out before too long.’
‘And the Hereford hookers?’
‘Sure, and the working girls of Worcester. “Come back to my kiln, my dear. Help me recapture some old memories.” ’
‘Each one of them acquiring, however briefly, the essence – the destructive essence – of Rebekah Smith. I just hope none of them ever got into his car a second time. I pray the psychological damage wasn’t permanent.’
He grimaced. ‘Depends what fucking Conrad did to them. Not much, by the end, I’d imagine. I suppose the times he couldn’t get himself fixed up, he’d potter along to the kiln and get auto-erotic over his photographs. And she’d be there for him.’
‘Like a drug.’
‘A craving, yeah. Until he died. How far you want to take this? I don’t know if it’s an infection, like the wilt, or a sporadic phenomenon. I don’t know whether it’s a wilful spirit or an imprint. Should I be poetic here? Should I say it came out of the kiln on the smoke of Rebekah’s cremation? Was it scattered with her ashes? How the hell can we know?’
‘Until you present her with a woman’s aura to enter, you probably won’t.’ She met his eyes and saw the fear behind the aggression.
‘You done this sort of thing before, Merrily?’
‘That a serious question?’
‘What I meant was, there’s nothing in the book on this one, is there? When she comes, if she comes, you’ll have to be fully aware of her and at the same time have a strong enough sense of your spiritual self to keep her out. At that point, you’ll be very much on your own.’