Friends of the Dusk

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Don’t say your brain can’t do that to you. Hallucinations are more common than we think. Most of us see things that aren’t there and just dismiss them.’

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘And if you’re doing that deliberately…’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘If you’re concentrating on visualizing something. Like say if you’re an artist. If you keep visualizing, like in a meditative state, and you’re like interacting with the energies of a place… like, if it’s a powerful place… then you could actually be conditioning your senses to start experiencing things that aren’t there. Maybe your brain starts doing that on its own. When you’re not… expecting it.’

  ‘Jane—’

  ‘And sometimes it mingles with your innermost feelings? Your anxieties. Your obsessions? And you’re seeing images you don’t want to see? Something the brain constructs from your fears and your deepest anxieties and your… subconscious self.’

  Merrily remembered last night’s dream, horrible but entirely explicable in terms of negative thoughts before bed.

  ‘Jane…’ She slowed the car. ‘Are we still talking about ghosts?’

  ‘I think so.’

  Something surfacing here. She speeded up. Keep it casual. There had been a time when Jane was experimenting with mental and spiritual exercises. Magic, in other words. The heavy pagan days. But that was over, wasn’t it?

  ‘You’re saying you were creating a ghost village at Cwmarrow. Visualizing it.’

  ‘Erm… more than that. Adding the sounds and the smells.’

  ‘Putting a living village into a deserted landscape?’

  ‘A medieval village. Pathways, rough housing. The smithy. The church.’

  ‘Did it lead to anything? Did you find any remains of buildings… anything?’

  ‘I told you. There was a flat area that could’ve been the site of a church. Like a circular churchyard.’

  ‘And… something happened?’

  They came out at Kinnersley on to the Leominster road. The pleasant road home, open fields long views. The rain had stopped and the sky was ambered.

  ‘I was just theorizing, that’s all,’ Jane said. ‘Just thinking, like, what if something had happened?’ Staring through the windscreen at the open road. ‘That’s all.’

  When they got in, the answering machine was bleeping.

  When was it not?

  ‘After the meditation,’ Merrily said. ‘We’re going to have a proper meal. No fast food, no crap.’ Aware of all the times she’d said that on a Sunday evening. ‘OK?’

  ‘OK.’

  Jane trying to smile.

  ‘And we’ll get Lol round, is that all right? I feel bad about Lol.’

  Jane started shaking her head sadly.

  ‘You talk about him like he’s just some neighbour who lives on his own and we ought to invite him round occasionally.’

  Merrily blinked in the silence.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Jane said.

  ‘Yeah… well…’

  Merrily undid her coat, pulling the paperback of The Summoning from a side pocket and laying it on the edge of the refectory table. She’d taken it out of the deliverance bag as soon as she’d got back to the car. It might be just an airline bag, but its contents were exclusive.

  Jane picked up the book.

  ‘Who gave you this?’

  ‘Adam Malik. He bought it for his daughter. He thinks it might help for me to read it.’

  ‘Rather you than me. Life’s well too short for romantic vampires.’

  ‘Let nobody say I don’t suffer for my… whatever it is.’ The cat door snapped; there was mewing. Merrily dropped her coat over a cane chair. ‘Right, Ethel. Food. Forgot to top up the dried before we went out.’

  ‘I’ll sort it. Go and deal with the machine, it’s getting on my nerves.’

  Sophie said, ‘I did suggest you rang back after your meditation service.’

  ‘I know you did. I’m just trying to clear the decks because we’re hoping to have a decent meal tonight, for once.’

  ‘Tomorrow then,’ Sophie said. ‘Tomorrow will do.’

  ‘Erm…’ Merrily prodded the scullery door to with a foot. ‘Somehow, I don’t think so.’

  There had been three messages on the machine, all from Sophie, asking her to call back. Only the final one had suggested she might leave it now until after the meditation. Sophie didn’t like to damage anyone’s performance in church. And how often did she ring on a Sunday about something that could wait?

  ‘I’ve an hour before the meditation.’

  Sophie laughed nervously.

  Nervously. Sophie.

  Merrily said nothing.

  ‘I didn’t sleep much last night,’ Sophie said. ‘This is something which… is not the kind of thing I do, you see.’

  ‘What isn’t?’

  ‘The Archdeacon’s offer to you? Of the Rural Dean position?’

  ‘I’m so excited I’ve thought of little else.’

  ‘Obviously, that followed a meeting with the Bishop.’

  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘Which took place here. In the office. Our… office. Which the Bishop now regards as his office. His base in the community.’

  ‘Where he can watch his flock milling down in Broad Street.’

  ‘When Siân arrived,’ Sophie said, ‘the Bishop suggested that I might want to do some shopping.’

  ‘You mean he wanted you to leave them alone.’

  ‘Evidently.’

  ‘No little woman can ever resist an unexpected opportunity for some shopping, Sophie.’

  ‘I almost always sat in on Bernard Dunmore’s business meetings. It was part of my job, as his secretary.’

  ‘Celebrated all over the city, and beyond, for her discretion.’

  ‘Don’t laugh at me, Merrily.’

  Sophie’s voice rising, cracked.

  ‘I’m sorry. Never have laughed at you. Never will.’

  ‘I had a fairly good idea what they were going to discuss.’

  She would have known exactly what they were going to discuss.

  ‘I said a silent prayer. For advice.’

  Merrily said nothing. The door hadn’t quite shut. She could hear Jane talking to Ethel. There was no noise from outside but in her head she could hear the old briar tapping against the window.

  ‘There was no apparent discouragement,’ Sophie said.

  ‘He trusts you, then.’

  ‘I… once saw a reporter from Radio Hereford and Worcester interviewing the Dean in the Close. It was an impromptu interview, the Dean had to catch a train and she didn’t have her recording device. So she simply brought out her iPhone and recorded the interview on that. I was astonished.’

  ‘A little-known technological miracle,’ Merrily said. ‘The tiny mic in an iPhone can give you a recording in broadcast quality. Making you wonder why they need all this expensive kit, but then I’m just a vicar.’

  ‘I never forgot that. What the iPhone could do.’

  ‘And, erm… you have one, don’t you, Sophie?’

  Bloody hell.

  ‘When I’m in the office I keep it in my mail tray. When I went shopping, I didn’t take it with me.’

  ‘Sophie…’

  ‘Doesn’t take much to… accidentally set it recording. I left a flimsy letter half over it. Old-fashioned airmail quality. Hoping the battery was charged.’

  It would be fully charged.

  ‘And so it recorded the meeting between Bishop Craig and Siân Callaghan-Clarke. In what would have been full BBC broadcast quality if the phone had been closer to them. But it’s still audible.’ Sophie paused. ‘Disturbingly audible.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I was stupid enough to listen to it in full before bed.’

  ‘Oh. Not good, then.’

  ‘Not good at all.’

  A silence. Back in the kitchen, Jane was talking again, but not to Ethel. No, then, I don’t know. Maybe. On her mobi
le perhaps. OK, I’ll try.

  ‘Merrily, I’ve been private lay secretary to the bishops of Hereford for more years than I’m inclined to admit. The question of what I’d done being a possible betrayal engaged me for some time in the hours before dawn.’

  Yes. It would.

  ‘I’ve downloaded it to my computer,’ Sophie said. ‘Having given the matter further consideration, I think I should send it to you.’

  ‘Sophie, I—’

  ‘Don’t listen to it until after your meditation. Perhaps even leave it until tomorrow. I’d just ask you not to send it to anyone else. Distrusting the Internet, as I do. If you wanted someone – say Huw Owen – to hear it, you could perhaps ask him to come over. Or take it to him.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I shall send it… now. There. Done. My conscience is entirely clear. I was reminded who I worked for.’

  Not God. Not directly.

  ‘The—’

  ‘The Cathedral.’

  Saying it slowly as if the word itself was empowering, could light up like a chandelier.

  She didn’t go near the computer.

  Jane had made some tea, and they sat at the refectory table, and Jane picked up the paperback, The Summoner. Turning it over to see what was standing on the edge of the beam of light from the castle keep.

  ‘Could I read a bit of this, after all?’

  ‘I’d be quite glad if you would, actually, flower. I might whizz through it too quickly, miss something you’d probably spot.’

  ‘No need to butter me up.’ Jane laid the book down. ‘That was Sophie?’

  ‘Bishop trouble.’

  ‘And you don’t have to keep taking this.’ Jane’s face was expressionless. ‘I like it here, and there are a lot of things that still need doing but…’

  ‘Hell, flower, it’s not that bad.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘No.’

  Merrily stood up.

  ‘Maybe I won’t come tonight,’ Jane said. ‘I’ll read some of this crap. Make myself useful.’

  She didn’t say who she’d been speaking to on the phone. But then why should she?

  Upstairs, Merrily changed into the Sunday evening meditation kit: velvety jeans, black woollen top, discreet pectoral cross. No dog collar. There’d been a few moans when she’d introduced the meditation to replace Evensong, but it was working now. Brilliantly, some weeks, and for all the right reasons now that the healing element was on the back-burner, less intense. A time of renewal. Forty people some weeks, and building again with Christmas in sight.

  When she padded across to the church to light the candles, bring her chair down to the spot below the rood screen, some of the regulars were already there: Gus and Amanda from the bookshop, Kent Asprey, the GP, Barry from the Black Swan, who came in once a month. Gomer Parry – did he meditate or just ruminate? Some of them were not what you’d call Christians, not what you’d call anything. Which was fine; she’d given up drawing distinctions. It was about a communal spirituality, a calming. A village thing.

  Sometimes she imagined she could see the benign shade of Lucy Devenish moving on the edge of the candleglow. Lucy who had been mentor to both Jane and Lol, who had lived in what was now Lol’s cottage, her famous poncho draped over the newel post at the bottom of the stairs.

  But Lol himself…

  She looked from face to shadowed face.

  … was not here.

  Not that he’d ever been seen a lot in church, having grown up wary of organized religion, thanks to fundamentalist, happy-clappy parents who’d disowned him when he needed them most. His apathy, built on old resentment, hadn’t quite gone away. Morning service, the trite hymns, the quavering psalms, the cloying sameness of a grinding anachronism… a sense of wasted hours.

  The compromise had been the meditations, growing from an image, a line, a verse. Lucy Devenish had introduced him to Thomas Traherne, seventeenth-century Herefordshire poet and nature mystic. Merrily thought that Lol, having been away so long, would be here tonight. The church filled up, he didn’t come.

  She stood up, disappointed. Verses from Luke that recalled Traherne would provide tonight’s glowing mantra. She didn’t really need the book. Gave it to them as Traherne would have done in the seventeenth century, but soft-voiced. The acoustics in Ledwardine church were good at soft.

  ‘The light of the body is in the eye. Therefore when thine eye is single thy whole body is full of light.’

  She looked into the core of the furthest candle, in a stone niche beside the vestry door at the bottom of the nave. What did the eye really see? What did the impressionable mind convince the eye that it had seen?

  What did Jane think she’d seen in the Cwmarrow valley?

  ‘But when thine eye is evil thy body also is full of darkness. Take heed, therefore, that the light which is in thee is not darkness. So if thy whole body therefore be full of light, having no part dark, the whole shall be full of light as when the bright shining of a candle doth give thee light.’

  When she looked up, the candle had become the white sleeplamp in the computer, blooming like a snowdrop, cold in the dimness.

  35

  Cold case

  THEY TOOK THE pizza out of the microwave, sat down to divide it at the breakfast bar. The blinds were down, the lights were dimmed.

  ‘Jerry Soffley,’ Bliss said. ‘Don’t like him. Called me sergeant. And Frank. Frank.’

  Annie rolled her eyes. He’d told her some time ago about his dad, Francis Bliss senior, known as Frank, who’d counted domestic violence amongst his hobbies in the days before it was considered much of a crime. Dead now. Old twat fell off the Liverpool pier head, Bliss liked to say, although it wasn’t that simple. What he’d never told Annie was that Kirsty, his wife, had also called him Frank towards the end, knowing exactly what she was saying. Knowing also that it wasn’t true, but she could be vindictive, Kirsty.

  ‘He did bring his laptop in, mind,’ Bliss said. ‘Soffley. Turns out he actually lives above the shop, some squalid little one-bed flat. Used to have a place at Bobblestock. Must be on his uppers.’

  ‘What if he deleted things before he brought the laptop in?’

  ‘To keep Karen out, he’d have to’ve extracted his hard disk and driven over it a few times, and even then… What bothers me is that he might have a number two lappie tucked away. I really wanna go and see him again, but I need something to nail on him. Don’t wanna be accused of goth-bashing.’

  ‘Goths.’ Annie frowned. ‘I really didn’t want us to have to go there. Waste of space, people like that. Fantasists.’

  Meaning she didn’t understand what drove them. New Age dark. More than just a fashion thing. Annie didn’t even understand New Age lite.

  ‘People who post on Neogoth,’ Bliss said. ‘All right, let’s go out on a limb here. Let’s suppose that somewhere there’s a nutter who wants that skull for what he thinks it is.’

  ‘I thought Cooper knew exactly what it was.’

  ‘Yeh, yeh, he does. But it’s nuts and bolts to him, it’s not, I dunno, magic.’

  Annie looked pained.

  ‘All right.’ Bliss brought up the picture on his phone. ‘The stone in its gob, like an Uncle Joe’s Mint Ball…’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Never mind. Under the circumstances – i.e. that he’s let it slip through his fingers – Cooper’s not gonna big that up for us or anybody. But that stone, that’s the best evidence Greenaway has that this is a significant skull. The head of a feller thought to be a vampire.’

  Annie sighed. Flicking off the skull picture, Bliss noticed he had an email from Billy Grace, the pathologist, but he kept on talking.

  ‘I got Vaynor to go into it on the Net. Stone in the mouth, not uncommon in a deviant burial. If it’s a white stone, it might have significance in a Christian burial as a symbol of resurrection. In a good way – put there to benefit the deceased. This doesn’t look like a white stone to me, though it could just’ve g
ot mucky over the centuries, but let’s assume it’s not. To some of the weirdos who do their shopping with Jerry Soffley, this feller’s a vampire.’

  ‘Have we talked to experts?’

  ‘Yeh, we put in a call to the University of the Undead. Aw, come on, Annie, who’s an expert in this kind of crap? Unless, of course…’

  Annie sat up.

  ‘No.’

  ‘What did I say?’

  ‘You didn’t. Don’t.’

  Bliss smiled.

  ‘Mrs Watkins does, in the course of her job, run into people with unorthodox beliefs.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I realize you never liked her much.’

  Annie reached for the coffee pot, looked at Bliss who shook his head. This wasn’t a caffeine kind of night. Annie poured some for herself.

  ‘Francis, look. It’s nothing to do with that. I saw another side of her the night you were hurt. More rational than I’d realized. And intuitive.’

  ‘You said.’

  ‘Did I mention that the chief constable and I had lunch with the new Bishop of Hereford?’

  ‘I thought that was just…’

  ‘A social formality. The chief wanted me to go along because his knowledge of Hereford isn’t extensive. New Bishop’s a man called Innes. New broom. Not like Dunmore. Didn’t appear to think we had any mutual interests. More interested in what we could do for him, in relation to church security and the increase in thefts. The chief proudly reminding him about all the stolen statuary we’d recovered and offering to provide advice for the diocese on more efficient locks, burglar alarms, et cetera, et cetera. And I said, without thinking much about it, that we were grateful for the occasional assistance of some of his people, notably Merrily Watkins, in providing information leading to certain significant arrests.’

  Bliss put down his phone.

  ‘You didn’t tell me about saying that.’

  ‘Why would I? Anyway, it didn’t go any further. He brushed it aside. Said he was glad the diocese had been helpful, but any future consultation with any of his staff should be directed through his office.’

  ‘Ah, they all start like that.’

  ‘I think he was serious.’

  ‘So?’