by Phil Rickman
‘Gone to work. I mean… she’s… at work. Presumably.’
‘Only, with the boss skiving off, the PM report on Stock’s arrived on my desk, with no little controversy.’
‘We were talking about Stock earlier.’
‘A lot of people are talking about Stock again this morning.’
‘It’s what he would’ve wanted. We were still trying to think why he did it – hanged himself.’
‘It’s a mystery,’ Frannie Bliss said. ‘And not the only one.’
‘Can I give Merrily a message?’
Bliss thought about it, sighed. ‘Bugger it,’ he said. ‘This is tormenting me a bit. Stock strung himself up with his shirt, right?’
‘That’s what we heard.’
‘The PM report says the severe ligature marks found on his neck are what you might call inconsistent with that. According to the Home Office pathologist and the forensics lab, we should be looking for a length of rusty wire, maybe seven or eight millimetres thick, probably multi-stranded. There was no sign of any such wire in Stock’s cell. We can be fairly sure he did not bring any in with him. And it was certainly not around his neck when he was cut down. Needless to say, the remand centre is being searched, no doubt, even as we speak.’
‘Strange.’
‘It is, isn’t it? There was also an impression on the side of his neck strongly suggestive of a hook being attached to the wire. One of my lads, who was a farmer’s boy, had an idea what this might be.’
Lol said, ‘You’re talking about hop-wire, aren’t you?’
Closing Credits
FOR TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE with hops, kilns, furnaces, gypsies, exorcism etc., thanks to:
Krys and Geoff ‘Chovihano’ Boswell (no relation), Paul Gibbons, Tony Heavens and Lynn, Mike Kreciala, Jeannine McMullen, Colin Osborne, Tony Priddle, John Pudge, Lisle Ryder, Tony Wargent and Trudy Williams.
Jani Sue Muhlestein gave me a timely reminder about Simon St John, whose rather gruelling earlier history is chronicled in December.
Once again, my wife, Carol, edited the manuscript with stunning perception, and pulled back the novel from the brink of the abyss with two perfectly tailored ideas. Thanks, too, to my editor, Peter Lavery, scourge of the staccato sentence, for the ultra-sensitive fine-tune, and to my agent, Andrew Hewson, who solved that delicate final problem. (Look, she’s a 37-year-old woman…!)
If I bent the facts about the hop industry in the Frome Valley, no blame should be attached to A Pocketful of Hops, produced and published by The Bromyard Local History Society or Richard Filmer’s Hops and Hop Picking (Shire). On Romanies, Patrick ‘Jasper’ Lee’s We Borrow the Earth (Thorsons) was an inspiration, as were Jean-Paul Clebert’s seminal Gypsies and the haunting and evocative A Time from the World by Rowena Farre and Raymond Buckland’s Gypsy Witchcraft and Magic. I’m still not sure know how much of a threat a mulo is to a gaujo, but my advice is: don’t chance it.
Martin Israel’s profound and unflinchingly direct book, Exorcism, is published by the SPCK.
All the characters are entirely imaginary, and no councillors or officials, bent or clean, in the story have any connection with the members or staff of the existing Herefordshire Council. The Barnchurch Trading Estate is not, we must all hope, on anyone’s planning schedule. And while West Mercia Police may have had their problems over the years, none, to my knowledge, have been in relation to the Frome Valley, where Knight’s Frome may be difficult to find and nobody remembers the Emperor.
The songs Cure of Souls, Camera Lies and The River Frome Song can be heard, along with others from the series, on the CD Songs from Lucy’s Cottage by Lol Robinson with Hazey Jane II. Lady of the Bines is on the second Lol album, A Message from the Morning, both obtainable via the website www.philrickman.co.uk
The Cure of Souls background and locations can be found in Merrily’s Border, published by Logaston Press.
PHIL RICKMAN was born in Lancashire and lives on the Welsh border. He is the author of the Merrily Watkins series, and The Bones of Avalon. He has won awards for his TV and radio journalism and writes and presents the book programme Phil the Shelf for BBC Radio Wales.
ALSO BY PHIL RICKMAN
THE MERRILY WATKINS SERIES
The Wine of Angels
Midwinter of the Spirit
A Crown of Lights
The Cure of Souls
The Lamp of the Wicked
The Prayer of the Night Shepherd
The Smile of a Ghost
The Remains of an Altar
The Fabric of Sin
To Dream of the Dead
The Secrets of Pain
OTHER BOOKS
The Bones of Avalon
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