The Cure of Souls

by Phil Rickman

  Daylight filled the crack around the door. When he put a hand up to the latch, he found it was already up. Which was odd, because he was sure he’d closed the door and heard the latch fall into place.

  It was probably warped. He opened it and went out, and there she was in the porch, blocking his path with her wheelchair.

  ‘A religious man after all, then, is it, Lol?’

  There were no unfamiliar cars in the palace yard; no one was waiting under the arch or at the top of the stairs.

  Sophie unlocked the office door. ‘If he doesn’t show up now, I think I shall be very annoyed indeed.’

  Inside, the phone was ringing. They heard the machine pick it up. ‘This is for Mrs Watkins. We’ve met before. Tania Beauman, formerly of the Livenight programme, now researching for the Witness series on Channel Four. I’d appreciate a call back. Thank you.’

  Merrily drew a surprised breath. ‘She’s got a nerve after last winter’s fiasco.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Sophie said. ‘I can handle this. I didn’t tell you, but we’ve had a similar approach from Panorama at the BBC. They’re all thinking ahead to the court case. They make a background programme in advance, to be screened immediately the case is over and the shackles are off. The spiel is that they’re going to make the programme anyway, and if you don’t agree to appear, your views may not be fully represented.’

  ‘What did you tell them?’

  ‘I said we’d discuss it when you returned from your holiday, adding – God forgive me – that I was sure we could trust the British Broadcasting Corporation to produce a balanced and accurate account, with or without your help.’

  There were two other messages on the machine, one from the Bishop, nervously demanding an update, the other from Fred Potter, of the Three Counties News Agency.

  ‘Look, nobody can print anything now, so I won’t be on your back for a good while. I just wanted to say thanks for your help, and if there’s anything I can do to help you at all… because, you know, I’ve heard one or two things which don’t sound that promising from your point of view… so, if you think there’s anything I can maybe tell you… you know where I am, OK. Thanks. I’ll give you the number again, just in case…’

  ‘Little shark.’ Sophie lifted a finger to delete the message.

  ‘No, I’m going to ring him.’

  ‘You’re not!’

  ‘What have I got to lose? Besides, he was—’

  ‘Everything,’ Sophie snapped. ‘For a start, you’re supposed to be on holiday.’

  But Merrily was already tapping in the Worcester number. The young woman who answered said Fred was on the phone, asked who was speaking.

  ‘It’s Mrs… Sharkey, from Hereford. I’ll hold.’

  When Fred Potter came on the line, Merrily said quickly, ‘Just don’t say my name aloud, or I’ll have to hang up.’

  ‘Mrs Sharkey?’

  ‘Never mind.’

  ‘Well, thanks for calling back, Mrs Sharkey. Hold on a moment. Ah, Sinead, you don’t fancy getting me a tuna on rye from the sarny bar? Plus whatever rabbity morsels you allow yourself. Excellent, thank you. This enough? Cheers.’ Pause. ‘Right, Mrs Sharkey, we’re on our own. Bloody hell, that was a bit of a turn-up, wasn’t it?’

  ‘A turn-up. Yes, it was.’

  ‘You know about the video?’

  ‘Video?’

  ‘All right, I’ll be honest. I knew Stock had the place bugged and wired up for sound and pictures. He told me himself.’

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘He had one camera wedged into a shelf at the time, and of course it fell over while I was there, and it was dangling by the strap. He asked me if I’d mind keeping quiet about it. Said he was convinced he was going to get something mind-blowing on tape that would prove he wasn’t making it up. That’s why I said I believed he was on the level – I couldn’t tell you, I’d agreed to say nothing.’

  ‘That’s OK.’ Thanks a bunch.

  ‘Besides, I was thinking, if he does get something mind-boggling…’

  ‘Seems like he has,’ Merrily said.

  ‘You reckon he thought something might appear during the exorcism?’

  ‘You’re just trying to find out whether I did one or not.’

  He laughed. ‘All right, forget it. Anything I can tell you, stuff you might not know? No notes, no recording, swear to God.’

  ‘What did you think of Mrs Stock, Fred?’

  ‘Good question. Er… well, the first thing I thought was, he’s landed on his feet there, hasn’t he just, jammy bugger?’

  ‘Meaning what’s a clapped-out old drunk doing with a charming young thing like that?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say say charming. Sexy. Not beautiful, but she’d got a certain… It’s funny, he was going on about what it had done to them, living in that place, making them withdrawn, nervous, all this… and she kept very quiet while I was there. But after it came out about the murder, when we’d got all we could in the village, I drove into Hereford and hung around outside the secretarial agency where Stephanie worked, back of Aubrey Street, and I had a word with a few of the girls when they came out. And I got just a completely different story.’

  There was a tapping on the door. Merrily glanced up as Sophie let in a man who had to stoop in the doorway. She saw grey and white tufted hair, a face like a tired horse. David Shelbone?

  ‘In these situations,’ Fred Potter said, ‘you’re just after kind of, “We’re all absolutely shattered, she was a lovely person who remembered everybody’s birthday” – predictable stuff, because this is the victim and it usually helps if the victim’s a nice person. You normally find the workmates or the neighbours’ve already had the cops round and the initial excitement’s worn off a bit. But on this occasion, as it happened, I was in there first. These women didn’t know about it.’

  Sophie offered the visitor a seat. Merrily put a hand over the phone, whispered, ‘Sorry, I’ll be one minute.’

  ‘So what I was getting was genuine, off-the-cuff reaction,’ Fred said. ‘The women looking at each other, shocked, naturally, gasps of horror, as you’d expect, then grilling me for information. But the quotes I was getting from them were not what I was looking for. In the end I put the notebook away because I was getting a load of stuff I couldn’t have used – asking more questions than it answered. And we weren’t going to get any answers, not now, with her dead and him—’

  ‘Questions?’

  ‘What I was getting was not a lot of genuine sorrow, to be honest. She’d worked for that agency four or five months. When she first arrived, she seemed very, very quiet. Very proper, very polite, butter wouldn’t melt. The kind, if she met a bloke on the stairs, she’d shrink into the wall to avoid him brushing against her.’

  ‘Stephanie Stock?’

  ‘And when she talked about her husband, it was like he was some sort of guru – her mentor, her guardian. Gerard this, Gerard that. “Oh, I don’t know, I’d better ask Gerard.” “No, I don’t think Gerard would approve.” This was when she talked at all.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘She changed.’

  ‘Damn right she changed,’ Merrily said.

  ‘Not overnight; it was a continuing process. If I’d been writing it up for the tabs, I’d’ve had the girls saying something like, “Stephanie was very quiet at first and hard to get to know, but the job really brought her out of herself, and in her last few days she’d been full of life and getting on with everybody.” ’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘You’re clergy, Mrs Watkins. I can’t…’

  ‘Oh, sod off—’ Merrily looked up, uncomfortably, with a strained smile for Mr Shelbone.

  ‘All right,’ Fred Potter said. ‘There was a bloke upstairs, an accountant. Divorced. Sports car. There’s always one, isn’t there? The one no woman likes to meet on the stairs on a dark morning. The one where they always prefer to hold open the door for him, yes?’

  ‘I know.’
/>   ‘Again, this is one of those bits where the girls’re exchanging knowing glances, and frankly I don’t think any of them knows exactly what happened between Stephanie and this randy accountant. But someone saw her coming down from his office one lunchtime, and after that the man was very subdued.’

  ‘More than he bargained for?’

  ‘No, he was actually scared – that was the consensus. I don’t know if this was an exaggeration, but they said he was working from home the rest of the week. Like he was frightened.’

  ‘You serious?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Fred said. ‘Yeah, I am actually.’

  ‘These women – they didn’t like her.’

  ‘I think it’s fair to say they did not like poor Stephie. One of them started whispering that she was probably a bit mental, and who knows what her husband had to put up with, and then another one’s shouting, “Hey, this isn’t going to be in the papers, is it?” and of course that was it for me – everybody clams up. Well, no way was it going in the papers, even if he didn’t get charged last night – this is the victim; if you make a victim sound too much like a slag, the level of interest goes right down.’

  ‘Meaning the amount of space you get, the amount of money…’

  ‘Well… yeah.’

  ‘What about the haunting? Did she ever talk about that at work? I mean, she must have, after that spread in the People.’

  ‘Somebody apparently said something like, “How can you go on living there?” but she just laughed, and then the boss sent her off to this garage, Tanner’s, temping, so they never saw her again.’

  ‘What’s the name of the agency?’

  ‘The Joanna Stokes Bureau.’

  Merrily made a note. ‘Thanks, Fred.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I’ve been wanting to tell somebody. It’s like I’ve been carrying her around.’ A little laugh, part cynical, part embarrassed… part something else.

  ‘It’s different, isn’t it,’ Merrily said, ‘when a murder victim is somebody you knew, however slightly. Somebody you’d seen not long before it happened.’

  ‘Yes,’ Fred Potter said, ‘it’s different. Look, is it OK if I ring you again, if I… if you…?

  ‘Of course.’

  She gave him her mobile number. She didn’t usually do that. It was that phrase carrying her around.

  29

  The Plagues of Frome

  EVEN FROM A few feet away, it looked as though the wheelchair was gliding through the undergrowth, cutting brambles like Boudicca’s legendary chariot with the knives in the wheels.

  In fact, Isabel knew where the overgrown path went burrowing through the tangled churchyard to the bank of the Frome. Where the wheelchair stopped you could see the river down below, like smoked glass.

  ‘Look at that,’ she said contemptuously. ‘No rocks, no rapids. Seemed such a nice boring place, it did, after Wales. No historical baggage, see – no ruins, no megalithic sites. No history at all that wasn’t to do with hops.’

  She wore a short-sleeved tropical top, with big golden flowers, and cord jeans. Her hair had amber highlights. There was a thin, grey shawl folded on her lap.

  ‘Perfect, it was,’ she said. ‘Perfect for us. And now – blood everywhere.’

  ‘Everywhere?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Huh?’

  Isabel shook her head. Apparently, she’d sent the vicar off on a pastoral visit to the farthest of his four parishes, up towards Ledbury. Missionary work.

  ‘Starting to mope, see. Becomes dangerous when he mopes.’ She looked up coyly at Lol. ‘ “You want a church run by politicians or by people who actually give a shit?” I like that. That’s telling Him.’

  Of course, she’d overheard it all, every whispered word.

  ‘And now you’re throwing it all back at Simon. Can’t blame you for that. Fair play, though, he did say bring her along to see him first, if she had plans to go into that place.’

  ‘We tried,’ Lol said tonelessly. ‘You weren’t at home. You were in Hereford, shopping.’

  ‘My fault. He was moping, and I got the feeling he was getting ready to… go in there himself.’

  ‘To exorcize the kiln?’

  ‘Or whatever was needed.’

  ‘He’d made it pretty clear he didn’t think anything was needed!’

  ‘Ah, well,’ said Isabel, ‘what he says and what he thinks…’

  ‘You’re saying,’ Lol looked up in despair at the flawless sky, ‘he did think something was needed.’

  ‘I’m not saying what he thought. You can blame me, like I said. I didn’t want him in there. I didn’t mind him warning your lady friend, that was only right. But I didn’t want him in there. So you see… It’s me to blame.’

  Lol didn’t say anything. Isabel wheeled herself back from the river bank, along the path, to the base of an arthritic-looking apple tree.

  ‘Funny, though, isn’t it, this whole religion business? God working in mysterious ways. How do people expect Him to work – bolts of lightning all the time? And there I am, sitting at the door, and you pleading for enlightenment: “Isn’t it time it all came out?” Me thinking, I must be it – the mysterious way. What a bloody honour.’

  Lol shook his head, mystified.

  Hands folded on the shawl on her lap, Isabel fixed him with a gaze blazing now with what looked like a fearsome candour, and her voice acquired a flint edge.

  ‘Time for us to talk, isn’t it, boy?’

  She got him to push her back to the vicarage gates and then down towards the main road. The haze had been burned out of the sky and the tarmac was beginning to sweat. There were hops on either side of them now, high on their frames, the fruit tight and green on the bines.

  ‘Preserve the beer, they do,’ Isabel said. ‘And the memories, I bet. And all the old hate.’

  Lol sensed a stage being set out and climbed up onto it. ‘So who do you think killed Stewart Ash?’

  ‘Does it matter?’ Isabel gazed downhill towards the just-visible roof of the hop museum. ‘Wasn’t Adam Lake himself, was it?’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Hasn’t got the balls. Big man, macho image, but no balls. I reckon, see, that what Stock was trying to suggest the other night was that Lake got somebody else to do it. No balls, plenty of money – that’s what Stock was saying.’

  ‘But like Lake said, would he really kill somebody just get back another little bit of his old man’s estate?’

  ‘Ah, well,’ Isabel said, ‘you’ve got to look at the whole picture, isn’t it? Son of his father, when all’s said and done.’

  Lol recalled what Gerard Stock had said in the Hop Devil about Conrad Lake. ‘You mean some kind of Nazi?’

  ‘Wasn’t far out. They still don’t say too much out loud, round yere, about all that, because old Perry-Jones isn’t dead yet, and Perry-Jones and Conrad Lake were part of the same disease.’

  ‘Armbands, Stock said.’

  ‘Nothing so obvious. Right-wing politics, racist stuff – you don’t get so much of that in the country. You get Tories, of course. They’re all bloody Tories, the old kind, stuck into their Little England feudal ways. No tub-thumping, though, no rabble-rousing. It’s the cities where the real extremism starts, isn’t it, the cities where all the immigrants go? How many black faces you ever see behind the wheel of a tractor? Life just trundled on in places like this: the same families, the same faces, the same hairstyles…’ Isabel reached out and fingered a bine. ‘Except in September, of course.’

  ‘The hop harvest.’

  ‘September, see, that was when the people of the Frome Valley had a taste of what life was like in the cities – drunkenness, debauchery, robbery, violence. All those thousands of common working-class folk from the Black Country and the Valleys. People like me. In fact my mam and my auntie used to come round yere hop-picking when they were young. Great times, she always says. Hard work, but a lot of laughs.’

  ‘Debauchery?’

  ‘Oh, n
o more than you’d expect with all those thousands of people and not much to do at night but drink and flirt. Got out of hand sometimes. And there was jealousy and rivalry… bar brawls, beatings, the odd stabbing. The Hop Devil – that was a no-go area for local people until about halfway through October. Bit like the Wild West. Then, one night, a farmer’s boy… they found his body in the Frome.’

  ‘What, murdered?’

  ‘Never proved. This was the early fifties, they didn’t have fancy forensics back then. But it was enough for Perry-Jones. He was off… “These barbarians…” ’

  ‘The Welsh?’

  ‘Thank you, Lol. No, the Welsh, mostly they just sang. This was the gypsies.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘The Welsh looked like everybody else, but the gypsies looked like foreigners, another race. The gypsies weren’t sociable. Clannish. Set up their own camps and only mixed with their own kind. Not that they weren’t loyal to their employers, because they were – more than any of the others, in some ways. But they were a race apart, and they knew it. What are they, originally? From India or somewhere?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘And heathens. Oh, Perry-Jones made the most of all that. Ambitious, he was, see – only a young man, then, in his twenties, and a firebrand. Didn’t care what he said. Well, nobody did back then. No such word as racism. You call the gypsies a bunch of no-good, lying, evil, murderous bastards, nobody’s going to jump on you for not being politically correct. “Get them out!” he’s screaming. “Clean this filth from our farms!” ’

  ‘He said that? With the war not long over? What about the Holocaust? All the gypsies who went into the death camps? Was that not fresh in people’s memories?’

  ‘If you listen to my mam, Lol, all that was fresh in people’s memories back then was the war itself and what a relief it was all over. Besides, I think it was years later before they even knew the extent of the Holocaust. Anyway, Perry-Jones, he was up for the County Council and looking for a future in Parliament, and he got a fair bit of support, blaming the gypsies for every bit of trouble. A lot of people, they have a natural fear of anything they don’t know about. And nobody knows about the Romany folk, do they, except other Romanies? Not to this day.’