Midwinter of the Spirit mw-2

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Yeah,’ Merrily said, ‘tell me about it.’

  They stopped outside the porch. She saw that the single long gothic window in the wall beside it had an iron bar up the middle. On one side lay the farm, and some houses on the other – a stone’s throw away.

  ‘If I was a Satanist, Major, I really don’t think I’d feel too safe performing a black mass here. You wouldn’t be able to chant very loudly, would you, before somebody came in with a torch and a shotgun?’

  ‘That’s what the police said. Must’ve been lunatics – but then that’s what they are, aren’t they? Not normal, these people. Beggars belief.’

  ‘I’ve never met one. I’d rather like to.’

  He peered at her. ‘Would you, by God?’

  ‘Just to try and find out why.’

  ‘What they’ve done in here may just change your mind. Ready to go in?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Not squeamish are you?’

  ‘Let’s hope not.’ She followed him into the porch, and he lifted the latch. ‘There’s no lock!’

  ‘There should be – and there will be. A new one’s in the course of being made, I believe. Perhaps these scum knew that.’

  ‘Meanwhile, the church is left without a lock?’

  ‘You can’t just put any old lock on a building dating back to the twelfth century. In you go, m’dear.’

  Holding the door for her, letting her go in first. A gentleman, ha.

  It was dim and intimate, no immediate echo. None of that sense of Higher Authority you had in most cathedrals, and big churches like her own at Ledwardine.

  It was in fact fascinating, the Church of St Cosmas and St Damien. Quartered by an arcade of stone and a wooden screen with a pulpit in the middle. Two short naves and what seemed to be two chancels with two altars, although she could only see one from where she was standing – a plain wooden table without a cloth.

  Against the far wall, and close to the floor, the stone effigies of a knight in armour and his lady shared that last long prayer.

  Merrily didn’t move. She was reminded of nowhere so much as the little stone Celtic cell where she’d had the vision of the blue and the gold and the lamplit path. Only the smell was different.

  She knew the smells of old churches, and they didn’t usually include urine.

  Before Tim Purefoy was even back with his keys, a big vehicle was roaring up to the barn bay, sloshing through the wet snow. The dull gold, bull-barred Mitsubishi, spattered from wheels to windscreen with snow-slicks and mud, skidded to within a couple of feet of the glass wall.

  Denny Moon slammed out, looking once – hard – at the barn, as though angry it was still there; not burned out, derelict, toppled into rubble. He wore an old leather jacket and a black baseball cap. Wraparound dark glasses, like he feared snowblindness. He took in the encircling trees and the overgrown Leylandii hedge, sucking air through his teeth.

  ‘Fucking place!’

  Lol walked nervously towards the car. ‘Mr Purefoy’s gone for his keys.’

  ‘Fuck that. I’ll kick the door down.’ Denny gave him a black stare. ‘Lol, what is it? What is it you know, man?’

  ‘We just need to get in.’

  ‘Look at you! Something’s scared you. What is it?’

  Tim Purefoy appeared, holding up a long key on an extended wire ring holding also two smaller ones.

  At the same time his wife came round from the back of the barn. She looked stricken. ‘Call… call the police,’ she stammered. ‘Better call the police.’

  Denny gasped and snatched the keys.

  The big room was brightened by snowlight from the highest window, exposed trusses the colour of bone.

  ‘Kathy!’ Denny bawled. ‘Kathy!’

  The smell of candlewax. Blobs of it on the floor.

  Denny’s head swivelled. ‘She sleep up there?’ He made for the stairs to the loft. He hadn’t seen the lawn, so he wouldn’t know that what they really needed was the bathroom. ‘Kathy!’

  Two doors behind the stairs: one ajar, through which Lol could see kitchen worktops and the edge of a cooker; the other door shut.

  Lol opened it and went in.

  Into the square, white, bitter-smelling, metal-smelling bathroom, quietly closing the door and snipping the catch, sealing himself in with her. Like he should have done on Saturday night – resisting the hostile thrust of the barn – when she’d said, I don’t want you to come in.

  His back against the door, he saw first, on the wall over the bath like an icon, the photograph of a smiling man standing before a Land Rover.

  On the rim of the bath were pebble-smooth shards of black pottery, arranged in a line.

  ‘No sign,’ he heard Denny shout from upstairs, sounding relieved, almost optimistic, because he hadn’t found her dead in her futon.

  Lol saw the crusted brown tidemark on the porcelain around the overflow grille, like sloppy dinner deposits around a baby’s mouth. Presumably a tap had been left running and the overflow had gulped it all down and regurgitated it on to the snowy lawn, stopping only when the primitive water tank ran dry.

  ‘Lol?’ Denny’s feet descending the stairs. ‘Where’d he go?’

  It was dreamlike. Lol thought at first – from the position of her, the stillness of the tableau – of Ophelia in that sad, famous Pre-Raphaelite painting.

  The thin pine door bulged against him as Denny tried to open it, and then battered it with his fists, making it vibrate against Lol’s back until Lol almost tripped and fell forward towards the bath. And he cried out, ‘Oh God!’ seeing it now as it was: graceless, peaceless, sorrowless – nothing like Ophelia.

  Who wouldn’t have been naked or grinning like Moon was grinning, congealing in her stagnant pool of rich, scummy, pinky-brown, cold water. With eyes open, like frosted glass, and lips retracted over stiff, ridged gums and sharp white teeth.

  Beautiful Moon, so defiantly disgusting now with her cunning, secret, bloodless grin and her blood-pickled fingers below her breasts – on the waterline, on the bloodline. And the wrists ripped open: not nice neat slits – the skin was torn and ruched.

  ‘Lol!’ Denny screamed, and the pressure on Lol’s back eased, telling him Denny was about to hurl himself against the door.

  She’d been here a long time, you could tell. This hadn’t happened this morning or even last night; this had to be Saturday night, maybe only hours after he’d brought her home and meekly taken no for an answer… almost gratefully, because he’d already had the sense of something dark and soiled. He should have said: Moon, there are things we have to talk about. He should have said this long ago – after the crow. He should have gone long ago to Merrily Watkins.

  Swallowing his nausea, he went closer and bent over the bath. On the bottom, between Moon’s legs, lay the eroded filelike blade, ragged and blackened and scabby and old, very old.

  He remembered those slender but unexpectedly hardened hands fouled by crow’s blood, and turned away, and opened the door to Denny.

  I’d like to sleep now, Lol.

  25

  Sad Tosser

  SOPHIE SAID, ‘Was it very horrible?’

  ‘It was, actually.’

  ‘It’s so utterly distressing.’ Sophie’s face creased into shadows. ‘I once read a book by a reformed Satanist who said that when they break into a church and do appalling acts, it has an almost intoxicating effect. Afterwards they feel a terrible elation. Almost… sexual.’

  ‘Well,’ Merrily said, ‘by the very nature of what they are, they’re not going to walk out feeling disgusted and nauseous, are they?’

  Sophie shuddered.

  When she’d gone, Merrily rang Huw Owen.

  No reply, no answering machine.

  She thought about calling Lol to rearrange that chance encounter with his troubled friend, Moon, but then Sophie came through again.

  ‘Merrily, it’s Chief Inspector Howe on the line.’

  ‘Oh. Right.’

  ‘Ms Watk
ins?’

  ‘Good morning.’

  ‘Ms Watkins, I, er… I’d like to consult you – as an expert.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Indeed,’ Howe said.

  ‘Heavens.’ What seemed likely was that the Superintendent, after a lunch with the Bishop, had strongly suggested Annie Howe consult Merrily over something, anything. Howe would be disinclined, as acting DCI, to make waves.

  ‘Ms Watkins?’

  ‘Sorry, just swallowing one of the pills I’ve been prescribed for moments of overexcitement.’

  Howe sighed. ‘Perhaps we could meet. I gather you’ve been cleaning up after devil-worshippers.’

  ‘Blanket term, Annie. I’m not convinced.’

  ‘Good. That’s what I wanted to discuss with you.’

  ‘One o’clock? Pub?’

  ‘No, I’ll come to your office,’ Annie Howe said, keeping it official, hanging up.

  Sophie came back again. ‘The Reverend Owen now. Take it on my phone if you like. I have to powder my nose.’

  It seemed that Sophie didn’t feel she was ready to hear about this incident in detail.

  ‘Hard to get rid of the taste, in’t it, lass?’

  ‘Hard to lose the smell.’

  ‘Number twos as well?’

  ‘Not that I could detect, but I didn’t go prying into too many dark corners.’

  ‘Aye, well, your problem here,’ Huw said, ‘is deciding whether this is the real thing or just kids who think it’d be fun to play at being Satanists for an hour or so.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t get away with just playing at it.’

  ‘In my experience you don’t, but let’s not worry about poor little dabblers at this stage. Tell me again about the bird.’

  ‘Well, it was… had been a crow or a raven. Is there much difference? I don’t know. It had been cut open, and its entrails spread over the altar. There are kind of twin chancels in this church, but this was the real altar, on the right.’

  ‘Two chancels?’

  ‘Side by side. Very unusual. Quite a special little place.’

  ‘Let me have a think.’

  Merrily looked down from Sophie’s window at white roofs on cars and people hurrying. Hereford people were essentially country folk, and country folk had no great love for snow. Certainly not November snow. Never a good sign; winter was supposed to settle in slowly. What if this went on until March or April?

  ‘Two chancels,’ Huw said. ‘They might see this as representing a dualism: left and right, darkness and light.’

  ‘Actually, there was some blood on the other table, too, as if the sacrificed crow had been brought from one side to the other.’

  ‘How do you know it was sacrificed?’

  ‘I don’t. It would be nice – nicer – to think it was already dead, and they just wanted to make a mess. Huw, the way you’re talking suggests you think this was the real thing.’

  ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘If it was the real thing, what would be the motive? What would they be after?’

  ‘Kicks… a buzz… power. Or – biggest addiction of the lot – the pursuit of knowledge. Nowt you won’t do to feed your craving. Ordinary mortals – expendable like cattle. Kindness and mercy – waste of energy. Love’s a drain, faith’s for feeble minds. Can you understand that? To know is all. Can you get a handle on that?’

  ‘No. That’s why I’m a Christian.’ Working towards it, anyway. Made it to the pious bitch stage.

  ‘Mind, a crow splattered over a country church, that still has the touch of low-grade headbangers. What are you going to do about it?’

  ‘Major Weston was asking for reconsecration. I said that wasn’t necessary, as a consecration’s for all time.’

  ‘Correct. What you proposing instead?’

  ‘A lesser exorcism, do you think?’

  ‘When?’

  ‘I was thinking early evening, if we could get some people together then. I wouldn’t like to think of the place getting snowed in before we could do it.’

  ‘You want me to come over?’

  ‘I couldn’t ask you to do that.’

  ‘Give me directions,’ Huw said. ‘I’ll be there at five.’

  ‘I can’t keep leaning on you.’

  ‘I like it,’ Huw said. ‘Keeps me off the drink.’

  Merrily smiled. She saw Annie Howe, in her white belted mac, walking rapidly out of King Street carrying a briefcase. ‘I… suppose you’ve heard about Dobbs.’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Any thoughts on that?’

  ‘Poor bugger?’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘Let’s hope so,’ Huw said.

  Sophie pulled up an extra chair for Howe and left them in her office. The Acting DCI kept her mac on. She hated informality.

  ‘My knowledge of police demarcation’s fairly negligible,’ Merrily said, ‘but aren’t you a bit senior to be investigating the minor desecration of a country church?’

  ‘I’m not sure I am.’ Annie Howe brought a tabloid newspaper from her case and placed it before Merrily, on Sophie’s desk. ‘You’ve seen this, I imagine.’

  A copy of last night’s Evening News. The anchor story:

  WYE DEATH: MAN NAMED.

  ‘Oh, this is the guy…’ Merrily had scarcely given it another thought. All memories of that night were still dominated by Denzil Joy. She scanned the text.

  … identified as 32-year-old Paul Sayer, from Chepstow. Mr Sayer had not been reported missing for over a week because his family understood he was on holiday abroad. Acting Det. Chief Inspector Annie Howe, who is leading the investigation, said, ‘We are very anxious to talk to anyone who may have seen Mr Sayer since November 19. We believe he may have arrived in Hereford by bus or train and…

  ‘No need to read the lot. It’s mainly waffle. His relatives aren’t going to talk, and we ourselves have been rather economical with any information given out to the press.’

  ‘Aren’t you always.’

  ‘Need to Know, Ms Watkins,’ Howe said, ‘Need to Know. Let me tell you what we do know about Sayer.’

  She brought out a folder containing photographs. Sophie, fetching in coffee for them on a tray, spotted one of them and made a choking noise.

  ‘Would you mind?’ Howe stood up and shut the door on both Sophie and the coffee.

  ‘I believe it’s known as the Goat of Mendes,’ Merrily said.

  A colour photograph of what seemed to be a poster. Luridly demonic: like the cover of a dinosaur heavy-metal album from the eighties.

  ‘We’ll return to that,’ Howe said. ‘But this is a photograph of Paul Sayer. He may, for all we know, have been around the city for several days before he was killed.’

  He had a fox-like face, the lower half almost a triangle. No smile. Hair lank, looked as if it would be greasy. Though his eyes were lifeless, he was not dead in this picture.

  ‘Passport photo.’ Annie Howe unbelted her raincoat. ‘Does look like him, though. Recognize him?’

  Merrily shook her head. Howe looked openly around the office. Merrily wished the D on the door was removable for occasions like this. She felt self-conscious, felt like a fraud.

  Howe smiled blandly, her contact-lensed eyes conveying an extremely subtle sneer. ‘You’re like a little watchdog at the gate up here, Ms Watkins.’

  ‘Look, if you’re not here specifically to arrest me, how about you call me Merrily?’

  ‘Actually, the people I call by their first names tend to be the ones I’ve already arrested. Standard interview-room technique.’

  ‘But the suspects don’t get to call you Annie.’

  You might wonder if anyone did, under the rank of superintendent, she had such glacial dignity. She was only thirty-two, Merrily estimated, the same age as the man pulled out of the Wye – Paul Sayer whose photo lay on the desk.

  ‘I expect you’ll get round to explaining what this poor guy has to do with the Goat and me.’

  ‘ “This poor guy
”?’ said Annie Howe. ‘Why do I suspect your sympathy may be short-lived?’

  ‘He had, er, form?’

  ‘None at all. He was, according to his surviving family, a quiet, decent, clean-living man who worked as a bank clerk in Chepstow and lived in a terraced house on the edge of the town, which was immaculately maintained. He was unmarried, but once engaged for three years to a young woman from Stroud who’s since emigrated to Australia. I’ll be talking to her tonight, but one can guess why the relationship foundered.’

  Merrily took out a cigarette. ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘It’s your office.’

  ‘I’ll open the window. Why did the engagement fall through?’

  ‘Don’t bother with the window, Ms Watkins. I’m paid to take risks. Well I suppose she must have seen his cellar.’

  Cellar?

  ‘Oh, my God, not a Fred West situation?’

  ‘Let’s not get too carried away. This is it.’

  Six more photographs, all eight by ten. All in colour, although there wasn’t much colour in that cellar.

  ‘Christ,’ Merrily said.

  ‘So now you understand why I’m here.’ Howe turned one of the pictures around, a wide-angle taken from the top of the cellar steps. ‘Is this your standard satanic temple, then, would you say?’

  ‘I’ve never actually been in one, but it looks… well, it looks like something inspired by old Dracula films and Dennis Wheatley novels, to be honest.’

  ‘The altar,’ Howe said, ‘appears to have been put together from components acquired at garden centres in the vicinity – reconstituted stone. The wall poster’s of American origin, probably obtained by mail-order – we found some glossy magazines full of this stuff.’

  ‘Sad.’

  ‘Yes, I admit I have a problem understanding the millions of people who seem to worship your own God, but this… How real are these people? How genuine?’

  ‘I don’t know… I’d be inclined to think the guy who built this temple is – I may be wrong – what my daughter would call a sad tosser.’

  ‘But a dead tosser,’ Howe said. ‘And we have to consider that his death could be linked to his… faith.’