Midwinter of the Spirit mw-2

by Phil Rickman

  Merrily examined a close-up of the altar. ‘What’s the stain?’

  ‘We wondered that – but it’s only wine.’

  ‘So, no signs of…?’

  ‘Blood sacrifice? We haven’t finished there yet, but no.’

  ‘How did you find this set-up?’

  ‘We had to break through a very thick door with a very big lock. The local boys were quite intrigued. Not that he appears to have broken any laws. It’s all perfectly acceptable in the eyes of the law, as you know.’

  ‘Makes you wonder why there are any laws left,’ Merrily said. ‘I’ve always thought Christianity would become fashionable overnight if they started persecuting us again.’

  ‘So,’ Howe gathered up the photos, ‘you aren’t very impressed by Mr Sayer’s evident commitment to His Satanic Majesty.’

  ‘No more than I was by the sick bastards who spread a crow over a lovely little old church, but…’

  ‘Yes, that’s the point. In your opinion, if we were to devote more person-hours than we might normally do to catching the insects who dirtied this church – which amounts to no more than wilful damage and possible cruelty to a wild bird, which is unprovable – might they be able to throw some light on the religious activities of Mr Sayer?’

  ‘You’re asking if there’s a network in this area?’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘I’ve no idea. It is our intention to build up a file or database, but I’m only just getting my feet under the table, and nothing like that seems to exist at present. My… predecessor—’

  ‘Is not going to be saying an awful lot to anyone for quite a while, from what I hear. If ever.’

  ‘I’m sorry about this.’ Merrily was desperate for another cigarette, but unwilling to display weakness in front of Howe – who leaned back and looked pensive.

  ‘Ms Watkins, what’s your gut feeling?’

  ‘My gut feeling… is that… although there’s no obvious pattern, there’s something a bit odd going on. I mean, I was on a course for Deliverance priests. All of us were vicars, rectors… Nobody does this full-time, that’s the point. We were told a diocesan exorcist might receive four, five assignments in a year.’

  ‘While you…?’

  ‘You want to see my appointments diary already – plus two satanic links within a week. Yes, you might find it worth following through on the Stretford case. I wonder if they ever return to the scene of the crime.’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘I’m going back tonight to do what we call a minor exorcism.’

  ‘Interesting. If they’re local, they might not be able to resist turning up.’

  ‘That’s what I thought.’

  ‘Thank you, Ms Watkins, we’ll be represented.’ Annie Howe snapped her briefcase shut.

  ‘Just one thing.’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘Could you make them Christians?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The coppers.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Two reasons,’ Merrily said. ‘One is that, if they’re not, I can’t let them in. Two, a few extra devout bodies at an exorcism can only help – I understand.’

  ‘You understand.’

  ‘I’ve never done one before, have I?’

  26

  Family Heirloom

  LOL SAT IN the flat above Church Street – Moon’s ‘Capuchin Lane’. He was waiting for Denny.

  He’d been waiting for Denny for several hours. It was going dark again. The shop below, called John Barleycorn, had been closed all day. Denny had not yet said he was coming, but Lol knew that sooner or later he would have to.

  It was Anna Purefoy who had found the photocopy, about the same time that Lol left the bathroom and Denny went in and they heard him roar, in his agony and outrage, like a maddened bull. It was Mrs Purefoy, Lol thought, who – in the choking aftermath of a tragedy that was all the more horrifying because it wasn’t a surprise – was the calmest of them.

  ‘Is Katherine dead?’

  Lol had nodded, still carrying an image of the encrusted overflow grille. Like the mouth of a vortex, Moon’s life sucked into it.

  ‘Tim,’ Mrs Purefoy had said then, ‘I think you should telephone the police from our house. I don’t think we should touch anything here.’

  And when Tim had gone, she’d led Lol to the telephone table by the side of the stairs. ‘I was about to phone for them myself, and then I saw this.’ Her red parka creaked as she bent over the table. ‘Did you know about this, Mr Robinson?’

  It was a copy of a cutting from the Hereford Times, dated November 1984. It took Lol less than half a minute to make horrifying sense of it. He was stunned.

  ‘Did you know about it?’

  A mad question maybe. Would anybody knowing about this have bought the old house?

  By then, Denny had emerged from the bathroom, and was standing, head bowed, on the other side of the stairs. After a moment he looked up, wiped the back of a hand across his lips and shook his head savagely, his earring jangling. He didn’t look at Lol or Mrs Purefoy as he strode through the room and out of the barn, the door swinging behind him. You could hear his feet grinding snow to slush as he paced outside.

  Mrs Purefoy said, ‘Did you know her very well, Mr Robinson?’

  ‘Not well enough, obviously,’ Lol said. ‘No… no I didn’t know her well.’

  And then the police had arrived – two constables. After his first brief interview, not much more than personal details, Lol had gone out on the hill while they were talking to Denny and the Purefoys. He ascended the soggy earth-steps to the car, freezing up with delayed horror, a clogging of sorrow and shame backed up against a hundred questions.

  He’d waited by the barn with Denny until they brought the body out. Hearing the splash and slap and gurgle and other sounds from the bathroom. Watching the utility coffin borne away to the postmortem. And then he and Denny had gone to Hereford police headquarters, where they were questioned separately by a uniformed sergeant and a detective constable. Statements were made and signed, Lol feeling numbed throughout.

  He and Denny had had no opportunity to talk in any kind of privacy.

  The police had shown Lol the old cutting from the Hereford Times and asked him if he’d seen it before, or if he was aware of the events decribed in the story.

  Lol had told them he knew it had happened, but not like this. He’d always understood it had been a shotgun in the woods, but he didn’t remember how he had come to know that.

  Later, the police let him read the item again. In the absence of a suicide note, they were obviously glad to have it. It made their job so much easier.

  ANCIENT SWORD USED BY SUICIDE FARMER

  Hereford farmer Harry Moon killed himself with a twothousand-year-old family heirloom, an inquest was told this week.

  Mr Moon, who had been forced to sell Dyn Farm on Dinedor Hill because of a failed business venture, told his family he was going to take a last look around the farm before they moved out.

  He was later found by his young son in a barn near the house, lying in a stone cattle trough with both wrists cut. Dennis Moon told Hereford Deputy Coroner Colin Hurley how he found a ten-inch long sword, an Iron Age relic, lying on his father’s chest.

  ‘The sword had hung in the hall for as long as I can remember,’ he said. ‘It was supposed to have been handed down from generation to generation.’

  A verdict of suicide while the balance of mind was disturbed was recorded on 43-year-old Mr Moon, who…

  ‘And when you left her at the door on Saturday evening,’ the sergeant said, ‘how would you describe Miss Moon’s state of mind?’

  ‘Kind of… intense,’ Lol had said honestly.

  ‘Intense, how?’

  ‘She was researching a book about her family. I had the impression she couldn’t wait to get back to it.’

  The sergeant had shaken his head – not quite what he’d expected to hear.

  Lol sat now in Ethel’s o
ld chair, shadows gathering around him.

  Sometime tonight he’d have to ring Dick Lyden – most famous quote: I realize you’re a sensitive soul. But you don’t particularly need to think about psychology when you’re shagging someone, do you? He couldn’t face it.

  Just before four-thirty p.m., he heard a key in the lock, and then Denny’s footsteps on the stairs.

  It had been Merrily’s plan to spend an hour meditating in Ledwardine Church before driving nearly twenty miles to meet Huw at the church of St Cosmas and St Damien, but she’d been waylaid in the porch by Uncle Ted in heavy churchwarden mode.

  ‘Where on earth have you been? I tried to ring your socalled office – engaged, engaged, engaged. It’s not good enough, Merrily.’

  ‘Ted, I’ve just spent nearly two hours trying to put together a small congregation that absolutely nobody wants to join. I have one hour to get myself together and then I’ve got to go out again.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Merrily, but if you haven’t got time for your own church, then—’

  ‘Ted,’ she backed away from him, ‘I really don’t want to go into this now, whatever it is. OK? Can we talk in the morning?’

  It was not too dark to see his plump, smooth, retired face changing colour. ‘Were you here this morning? Someone thought they saw you.’

  ‘Early, yes.’ God, was that only today?

  ‘What time?’

  ‘I don’t know… sevenish maybe. What—?’

  ‘Did you notice anything amiss?’

  ‘I just went up to the chancel to pray. Don’t say—’

  ‘Yes, someone broke in. Someone broke into your church last night.’

  ‘Oh God.’ She thought at once of a dead crow and a smell of piss. ‘What did they do?’

  ‘Smashed a window.’

  ‘Oh no.’

  ‘Come and look.’

  She followed him into the church, where the lights were on and they turned left into the vestry, where she saw that the bulb had been smashed in its shade and a big piece of hardboard covered the window facing the orchard.

  The vestry. Thank God for that. No stained glass there.

  ‘Did they take anything?’

  ‘No, but that’s not the point, is it?’

  No blood, no entrails, no urine. Merrily took the opportunity to fumble her way to the wardrobe and pull out her vestments on their hangers. She’d have to change at home now.

  ‘Have you told the police?’

  ‘Of course we did – not that they took much interest.’

  ‘I suppose if nothing was taken… Look, I’m sorry, Ted. I’ll have to take a proper look round tomorrow. I have to tell Jane where I’m going.’

  ‘And where are you going?’

  ‘I have to conduct a service over at Stretford. Near Dilwyn.’

  ‘This damned Deliverance twaddle again, I suppose,’ he said contemptuously. ‘You’re on a damned slippery slope, Merrily.’

  Denny’s speech, his whole manner, had slowed down – like somebody had unplugged him, Lol thought, or stopped his medication. Denny seemed ten years older. His oversized earring now looked absurd.

  ‘You see, Dad – he’d bought this house for us to move to when he sold the farm. At Tupsley, right on the edge of the city.’

  Denny had the chair, Lol was on the floor by the bricked-up fireplace. A parchment-shaded reading lamp was on.

  ‘Far too bloody close, that house,’ Denny said. ‘Christ. I used to wonder, didn’t he ever think about that? How Mum was gonna be able to handle living around here with his suicide hanging over us? The whole family tainted with it? Everybody talking about us? The selfish bastard!’

  Lol thought of that smiling man with the Land Rover who threw a shadow twenty-five years long. Denny lit up a Silk Cut from a full packet Merrily had left behind.

  ‘So after he… died, we flogged the Tupsley house sharpish, and moved over to the first place we could find in Gloucester. We had relatives there, see, and nobody there to blab to little Kathy about what had happened, like kids would’ve done if we’d still been in town – whispers in the schoolyard. Jesus, we never talked about it. It never got mentioned in our house – let alone how it happened. If some bloody old auntie ever let it slip, Ma would go loopy for days after. And me… she’s watching me all the time in case I’m developing the symptoms.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Schizophrenia.’

  Lol sensed Denny Moon’s personal fears of inheriting some fatal family flaw, some sick gene – Denny keeping the anxiety well flattened under years of bluster, laughter and general loudness.

  ‘So we… when Kathy’s five or six and starting to ask questions like how come she didn’t have an old man, we told her it was an accident. His gun went off in the woods. No big deal – she never remembered him anyway. When she was older, twelve maybe, I broke it to her that he topped himself, and why. But I stuck with the gun. You know why? Cause I knew she’d make me tell her what it was like, finding him. What he looked like in that trough – like one of them stone coffins you find around old churches.’

  ‘Yes.’ Lol found himself nodding, remembering the photo of Moon in the Cathedral Close charnel pit, gleefully holding up two ruined medieval skulls like she’d been reunited with old friends. So happy, so at home with images of death – reaching out to the image of her dead father, feverish eyes under the flat cap she thought he might have been wearing when he shot himself.

  Sick!

  Denny threw him a grateful glance. ‘I was fifteen. All you can do with a memory like that is burn it out of your mind – like they used to do with the stump when you lost an arm in some battle. So she leaves school, goes off to university in Bristol. I get the first shop – inherited, Mum’s side. I come back to Hereford. I meet Maggie. You know the rest.’

  ‘It never occurred to you she’d find out one day?’

  ‘Why?’ Denny croaked. ‘Why should she? All those years ago, how many people remember anyway? It was over. And how could I ever have imagined, in any kind of worst-case scenario, that she was gonna rent this place – the same fucking barn? What kind of impossible nightmare coincidence is that? I was amazed it’s still here. Like who’d want to live at a house with that abattoir right next door?’

  ‘Somebody obviously tried hard to keep the barn out of view.’ Lol thought of the wall of fast-growing Leylandii. Planted there, presumably, by the people who’d bought Dyn Farm from Harry Moon, or by the owners after that. Out of sight, out of mind, out of nightmares. ‘And the Purefoys were incomers. How would they know?’

  ‘Stupid gits.’

  ‘You…’ Lol hesitated. ‘You didn’t think of telling her before she moved in?’

  ‘And what do you think that would’ve achieved, Laurence? You think that would’ve put her off?’ Denny produced wild, synthetic laughter. ‘Her?’

  Poor bloody Denny, who wanted to burn away his own last image of Harry Moon like cauterizing a stump – terrified of what might happen if he came up here and it all crashed back on him.

  So he’d simply stayed away, paying Dick to look out for his sister, and both of them laying it on Lol. Wanting Lol to get close, move in with her. Lol imagined what Merrily would say about this – a situation so unbelievably flawed and precarious that only men could have allowed it to develop.

  And in a way that was right. But Lol could see Denny’s skewed logic: why he’d gone to Dick Lyden instead of a real psychiatrist, and to Dick rather than Ruth. A guy he knew from the pub – a mate, nothing formal. Someone he could talk to, without having to tell all. He’s an idiot, Moon had said.

  ‘That paper,’ Denny said. ‘That copy of the Times – it never even came into our house. You know anything about this – how she got hold of it?’

  Lol shook his head. ‘First time I’ve seen it. I don’t know… Did somebody give it to her? Was she going back through the old newspaper files, part of her research, and came across it that way?’

  ‘And just laid it out there on
the table, where the Purefoy woman found it? Had it all worked out, didn’t she? So bloody happy to join the father she couldn’t even remember.’ Denny began to cry. ‘Happy? You think she was happy?’

  Some psychologist, Lol thought… maybe even Dick in his paper for Psychology Today… might draw a flawed parallel with the Heaven’s Gate mass-suicides, all those people in San Diego who came to believe they could hitch a ride on the Hale Bopp comet.

  ‘I never understood her,’ Lol said.

  And always just a little repelled.

  ‘All down to me,’ Denny said, his voice flat and dry like cardboard. ‘It’s all going down to me. She suddenly learns I lied to her all those years ago; that’s what they’re gonna say. And that fucking sword – and the bath. You know where that bath is, don’t you?’ He sprang up, fists clenched at his sides. ‘That was exactly where the mangers were. For winter feed and water.’

  Exactly? Lol felt cold inside.

  ‘That stone trough… it was where the bath is now, I’d swear to it. They probably used the same holes for the fucking pipes. And the sword – that fucking sword, man! I want to scream. It is not possible.’

  ‘She said she dug it up.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Just outside. Somebody had been trying to dig a pond and given up and she saw this thing sticking out where the ground had been excavated. Unless she knew all the time about what your father really did, there’s no way she would have just found this thing and made that connection.’

  ‘Nooo!’ Denny leapt up, threw his cigarette on to the hearth. ‘You don’t understand, do you? The police… after the inquest, they asked if we wanted it back: the fucking family heirloom. The thing he’d specially sharpened on the old scythe stone, so it’d go through f… flesh… and veins, without much sawing.’

  Lol thought about the blackened relic. She must have sharpened that too. Must have honed the edge, testing it on her thumb maybe – rehearsing. You didn’t slash your wrists sideways, you cut upwards into the vein – a fellow patient in the psychiatric hospital had told Lol that. And warm water to prevent muscle cramps and stop the blood clotting. Dreamy, otherworldly, unstable Moon hadn’t done a thing wrong.