by Phil Rickman
‘Yes.’
‘He nearly killed your daughter.’
‘Yes.’
‘And who knows what he’ll do now?’ Mick said.
He came towards her, moving as an athlete, his arms loose. She knew that if she tried to run past him, towards the closed-down snackbar and the steps, he’d catch her easily. She stopped in the middle of the circular lawn, near the fountain with its stone pot on top. She put her hands up. He waited, a couple of yards away, moonlight on his hair.
‘Look—’ She tried to produce a laugh. ‘How about we treat this like last night’s conversation and pretend it never happened?’
Somewhere, over God knew how many intervening walls, she heard a car start up. That was the only sound.
‘I don’t think so,’ he said quietly. ‘I think you’d better carry on talking.’
‘I think I’ve said all I want to say.’
‘But not all I want to know.’
She found she’d now backed up against the ruined wall, far too high to get over. Probably the Bishop’s Palace garden behind.
‘There are people,’ she said, ‘who wish us ill. And I think – whether unwillingly, or because of blackmail, or something – you’ve been playing on their side.’
Her right shoulder rammed against a projecting stone, and she winced.
‘All the signs for them… Cantilupe’s shrine in pieces, I suppose, was the main one… I mean, if Dobbs had still been official, the spiritual defences would have been so much stronger, wouldn’t they? Instead of him having to struggle alone and furtively at night, exposed to whatever psychic influences were at work.’
She began to edge, inch by inch, along the wall. There was a lower section further along, no more than three feet high. OK, she might wind up on the Palace lawn, but she could make it down to the river bank and…
Oh Jesus, that was wrong, wasn’t it?
But what alternative was there? She kept moving – imperceptibly, she hoped.
‘Try pinching yourself,’ the Bishop said. ‘It might all be a dream, a silly fantasy.’
‘I don’t think so. And I still don’t know what you believe, if anything. I don’t even know if you believe that what they’re doing is likely to have any effect whatsoever.’
He smiled and stepped back from her. ‘You know, I never wanted to be a bishop. There’ve been far too many in my family. From an early age I knew what unholy shits most of them were, so I never wanted to be one of them. No, I wanted to be a rock star – or a cabinet minister. I actually quite envied poor Tony, for a while, but politicians… everyone suspects them, don’t they?’
‘Do they?’
‘Politicians are capable of anything, whereas bishops… bishops somehow are still seen as quite remarkably saintly. They might occasionally make some ill-advised remark about the fantasy of a virgin birth, but they don’t embezzle large sums, fuck other people’s wives or… what? What else don’t they do, Merrily? What else don’t bishops do?’
‘Oh God,’ she said. ‘Don’t make me say it.’
He straightened up, a foot taller than her.
‘Let’s go in now,’ she said. ‘You’ve already sacked me. I’m pretty stupid, really. A lousy exorcist, too.’ She shook her head. ‘I’ll go away immediately. I’ll apply for vicar of Penzance.’
‘Merrily, what else don’t bishops do?’
‘I don’t know that you did it. And if you did, I don’t understand why – or even if it was an accident.’
‘Go on.’
‘Paul Sayer – the Satanist dragged from the river.’
‘Ah,’ he said.
‘I think you know how he died,’ she said.
And she dived for the low wall.
He caught her easily and threw her down, well away from the wall, into the frozen flowerbed under the central fountain. He slapped her hard, backwards, forwards, across both cheeks, shocking away her scream as he straddled her, pushing her skirt up and thrusting a hand between her legs.
He gave a long, ragged, rueful sigh.
Then took his hand away.
She froze up.
‘The really unfortunate part, for me, Merrily,’ he said, ‘is that I cannot give you what you so richly deserve and would probably end up rather enjoying.’
She couldn’t move. She heard herself panting in terror, panting so loud that it might have been coming from someone else lying next to her.
‘DNA,’ he said. ‘D-N-bloody-A.’
Her spine was chilled, literally: the frost melting through her jumper as he pressed her into the soil. She tried to pray, while at the same time looking to each side of her for a possible weapon.
‘Because this isn’t me, of course,’ he told her. ‘Bishops don’t do this. It’s never considered feasible for a bishop to even contemplate doing this to a woman. A bishop’s whereabouts on the night in question are rarely – even in these suspicious times – ever questioned. Especially… if there’s an unpleasant, arrogant, sociopathic teenager like young James Lyden on the loose. Having been found hiding in the Bishop’s Palace and unceremoniously ejected therefrom by the understandably irate Bishop, he wanders the grounds…’
‘You can’t possibly—’
‘My dear child, you have no idea of the things I’ve got away with… I really do believe I am… protected.’
‘You’re mad. I can’t believe—’ She panicked then, pushing against him, tossing her head from side to side, summoning a scream.
He jammed an arm into her mouth. ‘No,’ he said coldly, his other hand flattening a breast. ‘Not that. Never that.’
Over his shoulder, she could see the Cathedral wall and one of the high, diamond-paned windows – with lights behind. With police, and perhaps a doctor summoned to examine Thomas Dobbs’s body, or an electrician to find out what went wrong earlier? Vergers, canons, all within twenty feet – as the Bishop of Hereford placed his long, sensitive fingers round her throat.
‘You rejected me, Mrs Watkins. On a personal level, that was the most insulting thing of all.’
‘I want to pray,’ she said.
He laughed.
‘Does that really mean nothing to you?’
He took his hands from her throat.
‘I don’t believe in God,’ he said, ‘except as something created by man in what he liked to believe was his image. I don’t believe in Satan. I don’t believe in saints – or demons. I accept the psychological power of symbolism, of costume drama.’
She said, ‘You really don’t see it, do you?’ She squirmed to a sitting position, her back to the fountain. ‘You don’t see what you are!’
He recoiled slightly, puzzled.
‘You don’t realize… that a non-believer who manipulates—’ she struggled to her feet as she spoke, ‘… who manipulates the belief system to promote his own power and influence…’ she snatched the stone pot from the top of the fountain; it was heavier than she expected; she almost let it fall; ‘… is the most satanic… person of all.’
She was sobbing.
‘Put it down,’ the Bishop said.
She managed to raise the pot, with both hands, over her head. She backed on to the path.
Mick relaxed, spread his hands. ‘You going to throw that at me?’
He was about four feet away from her. If she threw it at him with all her strength, he would catch it easily. If she came close enough to try to hit him with it, he would simply take it away from her.
His eyes caught the full moon. His eyes were at their wildest; she sensed enjoyment, a need to be at all times very close to the edge.
He shrugged.
‘I was going to let you pray. I was going to let you kneel and pray. I accept the level of your faith. Very well, I’ll use that pot, if you like. You can kneel and pray and, while you’re talking to God, I can bring it down very hard, very cleanly, on the back of your head. Bargain?’
Her arms were aching, but she kept the pot raised, like an offering to the moon.
&nbs
p; ‘It distresses me that you have to die,’ Mick Hunter said. ‘The way it’s turned out with you, that leaves me sad. I do want you to know that I’m capable of feeling real distress.’
He walked towards her with his arms outstretched.
‘Merrily?’
There was nothing more to say. She arched her back, feeling a momentary acute pain in her spine, and hurled the stone pot into the great gothic diamond-paned window.
54
Friends in Dark Places
YOU COULD SEE him sliding it into her. It was quite dark, but the camera came in close, and there was the beam of a torch or lamp on their fuzzy, shadowed loins. Candles wavered out of focus, balls of light in the background. You could make out the glimmer of a gothic window. Beneath the woman’s buttocks was what might have been an altar-cloth.
‘Is that him?’ Annie Howe asked. ‘Is it as simple as this?’
They knew from his parents that, for a period during his time at Oxford, he’d had long hair – though it was not fashionable at the time – and also a beard. But there seemed to be no actual pictures of him from those days.
‘It could be him,’ Merrily said. ‘Then, again…’
‘You going to invite his wife to look at this?’ Huw wondered.
‘If necessary,’ Howe said. ‘I’m advised it may not be entirely politic at this stage to expose a bishop’s wife to pornography, and ask her if she recognizes her husband. She’s coming back this afternoon from her parents’ house in Gloucestershire. I’ve already spoken to her on the phone, and she didn’t seem as shocked as she might be. Any reason for that?’
‘It’s a marriage,’ Merrily said, ‘and maybe a political marriage, at that. Put it this way, their kids go to boarding school, and Val seems to spend a lot of time away from home.’
‘Interesting,’ Howe said.
Her office at headquarters was no surprise. Minimalist was the word; the TV and video looked like serious clutter. Merrily found this calming for once; there were no layers here. She wondered if she dared light a cigarette. Perhaps not. Beyond the big window, the sky was grey and calm: one of those un-Christmassy mild days which so often precede Christmas.
‘All right.’ Howe stopped Paul Sayer’s tape and rewound it. ‘Let’s look at it one more time.’
‘Actually,’ Lol said, ‘that woman… Could I look at the woman?’
Howe glanced at him with tilted head, and set the tape rolling again.
The woman on the possible-altar wore a blindfold and a gag, but the more times you watched the scene, the less it seemed like rape. Too smooth. She was ready, Merrily thought.
‘It’s Anna Purefoy.’ Lol leaned forward from the plastic chair next to Merrily’s.
‘Are you sure?’ Howe asked him. ‘This woman looks quite young. I’m told the film could be twenty years old. I thought we might be looking at the very early days of home-video, but my sergeant suggests it was transferred from something called Super Eight cine-film. Even so, Anna would have been in her late thirties, early forties.’
‘It’s her,’ Lol insisted.
‘Aye, they like to take care of themselves.’ Huw Owen was occupying a corner of Howe’s desk. He was the untidiest object in the immaculate room.
‘I’m sorry, Mr Owen?’
‘Secret of eternal youth, lass – sometimes you’d think they’d found it. Then they’ll go suddenly to seed, or become gross like Crowley. Drugs were no help, mind, in his case.’
Howe stood with her back to the window. She appeared, for some reason, uncharmed at being addressed as ‘lass’.
‘Well, it’s clear that this tape is never going to be usable in evidence, even if we could put our hands on the original. But it does prompt speculation. Would you like to speculate for us, Mr Owen?’
‘I get the feeling you were at university,’ Huw said. ‘Did they have any kind of occult society at your place?’
‘There were a hundred different societies, but I was never a joiner.’
‘I can imagine,’ Huw said. ‘Well, you look at most universities, you’ll find some kind of experimental mystical group – harmless enough in most cases, but one association leads to another.’
Merrily said, ‘I have a problem with that. I can’t see Mick having any interest at all in mysticism.’
‘Happen a reaction against his solid clergy family?’
‘His reaction, then, would be to avoid any kind of religious experience.’
‘My knowledge of theology is limited,’ Howe said, ‘but what we’ve just been watching is not what I would immediately think of as religious.’
‘No,’ Merrily said, ‘it’s plain sex. If you’re looking for serious motivating forces in Mick’s life, you’d have to put sex close to the top. He’d be nineteen or twenty then, newly liberated from the bosom of what was probably a less-than-liberal family. Suppose he thought he was getting involved with people who could, I don’t know, extend his experience in all kinds of interesting ways.’
‘Very astute, lass.’ Huw patted her shoulder. ‘As you’ve been finding out, clergy and the children of clergy are always fair game.’
‘Yes.’
‘So we’ve got a lad from a high-placed clergy family, up at Oxford. What was he reading?’
‘History,’ Howe said, ‘and politics.’
‘He could have become anything,’ Merrily said, ‘yet winds up following his father into the Church. You just can’t see him as a curate, somehow.’ She looked up at Howe. ‘It’s like imagining Annie here directing traffic.’
Howe scowled.
‘That’s interesting,’ Huw said. ‘Why did he do it? You really want me to develop a theory, Inspector?’
‘Go ahead.’
‘All right. You’ve got this smart, handsome lad from a dogcollar dynasty, putting it around Oxford like a sailor on shoreleave. And he’s drawn into summat – drawn in, to put it crudely, by his dick. He’s having the time of his life – the best time ever. He doesn’t see the little rat eyes in the dark.’
‘Meaning what, Mr Owen?’
‘There is a network. It might not put out a monthly newsletter, but it does exist. The general aim is anti-Christian. They might be several different groups, but that’s their one rallying point – the destruction of the Christian Church.’
‘I’d have thought,’ Howe said drily, ‘that they could simply sit back and watch the Church take itself apart.’
‘She’s got a point,’ Merrily said, the need for a cigarette starting to tell.
‘Merrily, lass, you’d be very naive if you thought the Church’s problems were entirely self-generated.’
‘Sorry, go on.’
“They’ve got a good intelligence network, the rat-eyes. The Internet now, more primitive then but, just like Moscow was head-hunting at Oxford and Cambridge in the sixties, the rateyes had their antennae out.’
Lol said, ‘Anna Purefoy was in Oxfordshire then. She worked for the county council. She’d been fired from the MOD after some fundamentalist junior minister found out she was involved in magic, along with a few other people – a purge.’
‘Part of the honey-trap then,’ Huw said. ‘Beautiful, experienced older woman. Aye, I think we can rule out rape in them pictures. Happen she said she enjoyed being tied up. If that is Hunter, it’s an interesting connection, but I’d be looking for something harder. Suppose they stitched our lad up good? Suppose they had him full of drugs, and suppose he really did rape somebody – a young girl, say. Suppose they even arranged for him to kill somebody.’
Annie Howe began to look uneasy. ‘That stuff’s surely apocryphal.’
‘That stuff happens all the time,’ Huw told her. ‘You coppers hate to think there’s ever a murder you don’t know about, but there’s thousands of folk still missing. All right, say they’ve stitched him up – tight enough to have him looking at public disgrace and a long prison sentence.’
Howe sighed. ‘Go on, then.’
‘What do they want of him? I think
they want him in the Church.’
‘Oh, wow,’ Merrily murmured.
‘Make your father a happy man, they’d say. Repent of your evil ways. Make restitution. Join the family business. Either that or go down, all the way to the gutter. Well, he’s in a panic, is our lad: self-disgust and a hangover on a grand scale. In need of redemption. So he goes home to his loving family, and the result, after the nightmares and the cold sweats, is the Reverend Michael Henry Hunter, a reformed character.’
‘It’s a brilliant theory, Huw. Is there a precedent?’
‘Happen.’
‘Meaning one you never proved.’
Huw looked down at his trainers. ‘I once exorcised a young curate from Halifax who admitted celebrating a black mass. It was to get them off his back, he said. Blackmail again. I never met anybody more full of remorse.’
‘You think Mick—?’
‘It’s sometimes what they do. They get in touch after he’s ordained, with “Do us this one thing and we’ll leave you alone for ever.” Ha! You likely don’t know this, Inspector, but having a reverse-eucharist performed by an ordained cleric is a very powerfully dark thing. And a fully turned cleric is… lord of all.’
‘Like Tim Purefoy,’ Lol said.
‘There’s one as is better dead, God forgive me.’
‘Hold on,’ Howe said. ‘Are you saying these – whoever they are… possibly the Purefoys – might have been in touch with Hunter throughout his whole career?’
‘Very likely smoothing his path for him. A satanic bishop? Some prize, eh?’
‘Except he wasn’t really,’ Merrily said. ‘He was a man with no committed religious beliefs at all. Perhaps that’s how he could live with it. “I don’t believe in the Devil” – he said that to me. Perhaps he really believed he was using them.’
‘Very likely, lass.’ Huw opened out his hands. ‘Very likely. But it doesn’t change a thing.’
‘But what a career, Huw! What an incredibly lucky career. He never put a foot wrong, said all the right things to all the right people, charmed everyone he met with his energy and his sincerity. He actually told me he believed he was protected.’