by Phil Rickman
There was a light on, up in the Deliverance office in the gatehouse, and she could see Sophie Hill standing at the window, quite still, poised like a mannequin in some discreet dress shop for elegant women of a certain age.
But the composure was illusory. By the time she was halfway up the stone steps, Sophie was looking down at her, rigid now, in the office doorway.
‘Merrily—’
‘Just dropped in to see if you fancied a bit of lunch?’
‘Can’t. I’m sorry.’
‘Soph?’ Following her into the office, Merrily noticed that the white hair was coming adrift and a silver-blue silk scarf lay discarded in the correspondence tray. ‘Is there something . . .?
Looking into Sophie’s eyes. On any other woman’s face, the expression would convey maybe mildly disturbed. On Sophie it suggested horribly distraught.
‘Merrily, you’re not in a hurry, are you?’
‘Well, no, I—’
‘Could I ask you to mind the office for an hour? I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important. You’re not in a hurry, are you?’
‘You just asked me . . . No.’
‘Good. Thank you.’
Sophie pulled her coat from the peg. Merrily took off her black woollen funeral coat and went and sat down behind the desk. In the centre of it was the leather-bound pad Sophie used to take down the Bishop’s dictation. Nothing else.
‘There’s nothing I can . . .?’
‘If you could just look after the office for an hour. If the Bishop of Bath and Wells rings, tell him Bernard will get back to him tonight. If I’m going to be longer than an hour, I’ll call. If you have to leave, lock up, would you? You know where the keys are . . .?’
‘Of course I know where . . . You’re OK, aren’t you? I mean—’
‘Yes,’ Sophie said. ‘I’m fine.’
Had the Bishop’s secretary ever looked this pale?
Jane said, ‘You ever heard of a photographer known as Lensi?’
‘What?’
‘L-E-N-S-I.’
She was in a cubicle in the girls’ toilets, with the mobile. Keeping her voice down.
‘This a joke?’ Eirion said.
‘Irene, would I really be ringing you this time in the morning to tell you a joke?’
Was he glad she’d rung? Had his fancy phone ID’d her, with LED red stars glittering around her name? Was he excited to hear her voice, the way, if you twisted her arm, she’d have to admit it was really good to hear him, even to hear herself calling him Irene?
A few months ago, they’d been in one another’s phones all the time, like this was for eternity. But situations changed.
‘What’s she do?’ Eirion said.
‘She takes pictures. Photojournalist.’
Had to admit this was an excuse to call him. Yeah, yeah, she accepted she’d been looking for one and this would probably be the best reason she’d get this side of Christmas.
‘I don’t really know many photographers, except for a few TV cameramen,’ Eirion said. ‘I’m . . . as you know, I’m just another student.’
‘You don’t think you’re just another student, Irene.’
He read all the papers, in a professional kind of way. He remembered the bylines, who was a good writer, who got the biggest stories.
‘What’s her full name, Jane?’
‘I’ve told you, I don’t know her real name. She does pictures for the Independent.’
‘That’s a start. What’s she look like?’
‘Like . . . early thirties? Red-haired. Not small. Not exactly plump but certainly, you know, voluptuous.’
‘And you want to know about her because . . .?’
‘Because she’s just moved into the village and maybe has an interest in witchcraft or something. Not that she seems to know much about it. She’s probably just attracted to the nudity and fertility rites. And she wants to take my picture.’
‘Without your clothes?’
‘I can see I’m wasting my—’
‘If, however, you were just looking for a reason to call me, I’m flattered,’ Eirion said.
‘I was not—’
‘Jane, you’re doing your smoky voice.’
‘I’m trying to be discreet, you smug Welsh git! I’m at school, in the bog.’
A silence. Eirion drew breath.
‘A proper name would help. Jane, look . . . seriously, we haven’t really seen much of each other since the summer, have we?’
‘If you remember, you went off to university.’
‘It’s Cardiff. It’s less than a two-hour drive away, and I’m home at weekends. As you know.’
‘A lot can happen at university. You’re young – youngish – and unattached. Universities are full of loose women.’
‘Let’s not go into all that again,’ Eirion said. ‘I can assure you there hasn’t been anybody for—’
‘Longer than one night?’
‘For just over four months, I was going to say. Which, in case you’ve forgotten . . .’
‘No, I—’ Jane’s voice died on her. But could she believe this? ‘I haven’t forgotten.’
‘So I was thinking . . . Well, my dad and Gwennan were supposed to be going to France for Christmas, with the girls and I was thinking you could maybe’ve come over here.’
‘Where we’d have the house to ourselves. Kind of thing.’
‘Only that’s not going to happen now. Sioned sprained an ankle skating and they’re putting it off until the New Year, when you’ll probably be back at school. So I was wondering about maybe coming over there. Like for a few days?’
‘And stay where – the Black Swan?’
‘Yeah, on my massive student grant. I was actually thinking . . . the vicarage? You’ve got a lot of spare bedrooms. I’d pay, you know, reasonably normal rates. B-and-B?’
‘That’s—’
‘What do you think? Just to see if there’s . . . you know . . . anything left? You know what I’m saying.’
‘Irene, we were childhood sweethearts. It’s a phase.’
‘A phase.’
‘And like, if you really don’t know if there’s anything left—’
‘On your side. I meant your side. My side I know about.’
‘Oh.’
‘Jane, would I really be sitting here getting all sweaty and embarrassed and stuff, if I wasn’t still . . .?’
She didn’t say anything. She realised she was smiling.
Realising he’d never really gone away. That her life was full of Eirion cross-references. Although that wasn’t necessarily a good thing, was it? They were young, they were supposed to be putting themselves about. Why was she smiling?
‘It was just a thought, all right?’ Eirion said.
‘Of course, if the dig’s on in Coleman’s Meadow,’ Jane said, ‘I was supposed to be, you know, helping?’
‘And that’s limited, is it, to people who’ve belatedly applied for archaeology courses on account of they’ve been watching Time Team and Trench One and can’t think of any quicker way to get on TV?’
‘Au contraire, Welshman, I believe I can bring to the study of antiquities something new and meaningful.’
‘As distinct from your usual pseudo-pagan New Age bullshit.’
‘And I’m thinking, could I stand this for a whole week?’
‘Jane, you’d love it.’
‘I’ll talk to Mum,’ Jane said.
Somehow excited. Despicable, really.
Sophie, nun-like in her long charcoal-grey coat and her silk scarf, was walking rapidly across the Cathedral Green towards the Castle Street entrance, furled umbrella under her arm.
She lived back there, in one of the posh terraces behind the cloisters and the Cathedral School. Her husband was an architect, semi-retired now, the golf club a second home. An adopted son lived in Canada.
Merrily watched her from the office window. Some domestic crisis? Domestic, for Sophie, usually meant the Cathedral. Which she served. Living wit
hin its ambience, more a part of it than any of the bishops she’d worked for. Whatever had happened, it had to be serious for Sophie to be walking away from the Cathedral at not yet one p.m. on a working day.
When she passed out of sight, between the bare trees, Merrily switched on the computer, opened the Deliverance file.
Still just one entry for this month: a vague report of what Huw Owen would call a volatile – poltergeist activity, alleged, at a small warehouse on the Holmer trading estate. Request for assistance withdrawn before it could be checked out. Pity, really. There was always a reason for reported phenomena, always something interesting. But the Deliverance Ministry wasn’t the police; you went where you were invited.
The report, however, would stay on file in perpetuity, in case some future Deliverance adviser should be approached by some future tenant of the premises.
If nothing else, this job gave you a sense of eternity.
If nothing else . . .? In many ways, Deliverance gave you too much – too much to question, too much strangeness. Too much that seemed to have very little to do with faith and the yearning for transcendence, more with a basic, primeval fear of the unknowable. Sometimes the roles of priest and exorcist didn’t seem wholly compatible.
Time on her hands now, Merrily put the computer to sleep and tapped Al and Sally Boswell’s number in Knight’s Frome into her mobile, to check on the progress of Lol’s Christmas present.
‘Well, I think it’s nearly ready,’ Sally said. ‘Probably tomorrow, all being well.’
‘And I do want to pay the proper price.’
‘Al says you’ll pay what he asks. He’s quite annoyed with Laurence for not telling him sooner about what happened to the other one.’
‘Lol blames himself. Whereas I blame myself because it was smashed on the instructions of a man he was approaching on my behalf.’
‘It was a guitar, Merrily, not some holy relic.’
‘Sally, to Lol, a Boswell guitar is as close to a holy relic as you can get with steel strings.’
Sally laughed and said Al would understand. Al was of Romani descent. The lute-shaped bodies of his guitars contained many different kinds of wood, most of them pulled from the hedgerows and the copses and dingles of the Frome Valley where the Romani used to come annually to pick hops.
Sally, very olde English gentry, said, ‘I probably forgot to mention, he’s finally taken on an apprentice. Becoming more aware of his mortality, perhaps, and the need to pass on his skills. But that does mean he needs to turn out more instruments per annum, if only to pay the boy a reasonable wage. So, you see, they aren’t quite so rare and precious any more.’
‘How about I come over at the weekend? Is a cheque OK?’
‘Do watch out for the floods, though, won’t you, Merrily?’
‘The Frome’s out?’
‘Not yet,’ Sally said, as the office phone began ringing. ‘Well, not here, anyway, but Al tells me he’s seen the snails moving uphill.’
‘What?’
‘Hundreds of them, Al says. It’s an old sign. Slugs, too, apparently. A scramble for higher ground.’
‘Blimey. Look, Sally, I’ll have to go, I’m on my own in the office and the phone’s ringing.’
The Bishop of Baths and Wells? God, who was the Bishop of Bath and Wells now? As Merrily clicked off the mobile, a gust of new rain skated over the window behind her, like brushes on a snare drum, and she glanced over her shoulder. The way you did, now that something as drably prosaic as rain had turned sinister. She picked up the phone.
‘Merrily.’
‘Sophie?’
‘I wonder if you might join me.’
‘Now? Me? Where?’
‘I can meet you on the corner of Castle Street and Quay Street – do you know where I mean? It will take you no more than about three minutes on foot.’
‘Probably need to bring the car, Sophie, I think I’m about to get nicked for outstaying my welcome in King Street. What’s happened?’
‘I’ll meet you in ten minutes, then.’
‘Has something happened?’
A clock ticking at Sophie’s end. A big, old clock.
‘Sophie?’
‘You may not have heard, but there’s been a particularly horrific murder in the city. Or at least—’
‘I heard on the radio, yeah. You mean where the victim was . . . beheaded?’
Merrily stood up. Down below, Broad Street was like a sepia print, all its colours draining away in the downpour, and the Cathedral Green was deserted.
‘I’m with his widow,’ Sophie said.
12
Throwback
SOPHIE WAS WAITING in Castle Street under her pink and yellow golf umbrella. Surreal, like a bad dream in which you somehow understood that pink and yellow were the colours of foreboding and death.
‘Nobody here knows yet,’ Sophie said. ‘When it comes out, all hell—’
Her face looked thinner, with hollows. They were alone in what had been the medieval heart of Hereford. No shops here, no obvious public buildings, only timber-gabled cottages and three-storey Georgian town houses. Quiet, except for the beating rain and the murmur of old money, what was left of it.
Never mind Baghdad, think how many heads must’ve rolled routinely down here, below the walls of Hereford Castle.
Merrily had found a parking space near the footpath to the Castle Green. Not a stone left of the castle now, unless some remained in the foundations of these steep, solid, private dwellings, one owned by Sophie and her husband, another by . . .
‘What’s her name?’
‘Helen,’ Sophie said. ‘Ayling. We’ve . . . known one another for some years.’
‘I’ve heard that name . . . Ayling . . . have I?’
‘Well, of course you have.’
But the connection wouldn’t come. Merrily felt damp and uncomfortable in her funeral clothes.
‘She hadn’t reported him missing,’ Sophie said. ‘Hadn’t seen him for more than twenty-four hours, but it wasn’t the first time.’
‘Oh my God, she had to identify . . .?’
‘No, they spared her that.’ Sophie nodded down the street towards a three-storey terrace of old red brick. ‘It’s the middle one, with the cream door.’
She pointed the umbrella, began to follow it into the road. Merrily stayed at the kerb, getting very wet very quickly.
‘Sophie . . . why me?’
‘Because you’re . . .’ Sophie came back, held the umbrella over them both ‘. . . because you’re a widow and . . . and a priest. And you mix with these people.’
‘People? You mean the police?’
‘And because you’re here. Helen doesn’t have any relatives.’
Didn’t sound right. A touch nervous now, Merrily let herself be steered into a narrow alley at the end of the terrace, Sophie deciding they wouldn’t use the front door.
‘They’ll see us.’
‘Who?’
‘You didn’t notice the car parked on a double yellow line?’
‘The police?’
‘Watching the house. They wanted a woman to come in and stay with her, a . . . what do you call them?’
‘Family liaison officer?’
‘Well, even I know what that’s really for. Someone following her around, being solicitous, making tea, hoping she’ll let something slip.’
‘What?’
‘Here.’
Sophie pushed at a mossy, Gothic-pointed door in a high brick wall.
They were in a substantial walled garden. A dead fountain in an overflowing stone pool, rain bouncing angrily from a small conservatory backing on to the house.
‘We were in the Cathedral choir together,’ Sophie said.
As if this explained something.
‘How come no relatives?’
‘Well, not in Hereford, anyway. She met Clement in London when she was a secretary with the Association of County Councils, and he—’
‘Clement?’
&n
bsp; ‘Clement Ayling.’
‘Christ,’ Merrily said.
A high-ceilinged drawing room. The grandfather clock doing its hollow thock thock in the shadows. Tall windows silvered by the rain, a pastel green glow from a small reading lamp on a coffee table and a crimson glimmer from the fireplace. Pictures on the walls of the same man shaking hands with various notables: Princess Anne, Margaret Thatcher.
‘Merrily lost—’ Sophie coughed. ‘Lost her husband some years ago. In a car crash.’
Helen Ayling looked up, confused, from a brown leather wing chair. ‘And had he stormed out after a row?’ She steadied the white china cup and saucer on her knees. ‘I’m sorry, I—’
‘After several rows, actually,’ Merrily said. ‘Sometimes he walked out, sometimes I walked out. But it’s . . . hardly the same.’
The atmosphere was different from the dimmed death houses she often had to visit. Unstable here, still slippery with congealing shock. She and Sophie were sharing a creaky leather chesterfield. On the wall behind his widow’s head, Councillor Clem Ayling stood shoulder to shoulder with Bill Clinton – but only, Merrily guessed, for the photo.
‘It was rather stupid of me,’ Helen Ayling said, ‘even to mention the row. But you don’t think, do you? You can’t think. It’s as though everything around you is collapsing.’
No make-up, and her eyes were dry. She was slim and tidy and her short brown hair, though tangled, looked freshly washed. Merrily had imagined she’d be around the same age – who knew? – as Sophie, but she was younger, maybe late forties. So about twenty years younger than Clem Ayling.
‘They said to me, what was it about? What were you arguing about? I said, it’s none of your business, it’s a private matter – we had a row, like couples do, he walked out and he didn’t . . .’ her voice gave out and she swallowed ‘. . . come back.’
Merrily looked up at Clement Ayling in the Thatcher photo. A bulky, beaming man with grey hair, crisp and wavy, and an almost-Edwardian moustache. She’d never met him, knew him only by reputation: an old-school Tory, a dinosaur, a throwback.
Merrily’s mouth was dry. Someone had killed a former leader of the city council and cut off his head. All hell would break loose.
‘He’d done it before,’ Helen Ayling said. ‘Last time he booked into the Castle House, just up the street. He has an office, with a change of clothes, and he’d go directly there the following day. After he retired, the council became . . . most of who he was.’