by Phil Rickman
And horribly seductive to an adolescent who perhaps did sometimes feel like an alien – without previously having known why. Had something previously hidden been unblocked, horrific memories awoken?
‘So gradually Layla was feeding it out to Amy: blood in the church, blood on the altar. Then here’s Dennis Beckett in his vestments, with his chalice: “The blood which he shed for you… The blood of Christ keep you in eternal life.” And Amy Shelbone, kneeling in the chancel, is getting a whole different slant on this.’
All smelly and musty and horrible, and it’s full of dead people… There must have been some ghastly images in her head by then – Wayne Jukes, maddened with pain and shock, half his face hanging off, plunging the kitchen knife into Justine. And ‘eternal life’ was some church-bound, tortured spirit.
‘The big lie, the great cover-up.’ Merrily was rocking in the passenger seat, everything suddenly making blinding sense. He watches us suffer and die and he doesn’t help us, ever, ever, ever… Nobody’s going to ever save you. It’s all a horrible sick lie! ‘Amy only knows one church, one altar. She’s imagining her mother dead… in Dilwyn Church.’
She stopped, hearing what else Amy had screamed from her room: And I don’t… I don’t want to die in… Had ‘Justine’ predicted that Amy too was going to be killed or at least die in church? Had she given some kind of terrible warning that made suicide seem like a soft option?
‘The essence of all this,’ Sophie said, ‘is that the child has been virtually programmed to turn against everything the Shelbones cling on to. If that’s true, then, in its insidious way, it’s actually extremely sophisticated. Almost Satanic in its… Do you know what I mean?’
‘In the way the poison’s been introduced.’
‘However, I don’t even see that any laws have been broken. And I still don’t think you should get out of this car.’
‘You bastards.’ Kirsty Ryan lay flat in the churned hay, staring up at the deepening blue. ‘I don’t know whether you’re lying to me, or what. It don’t matter either way to me, though, look, ’cause I en’t catching no armful of shit for that bitch, I can tell you that much.’
‘Why don’t you just tell us everything?’ Eirion suggested.
Kirsty rolled her spiky head back into the hay. ‘Who is this guy thinks he’s Geoffrey Paxman?’
‘Just a friend,’ Jane explained.
‘Thanks, Jane,’ Eirion said.
‘Well, all right, a really good friend,’ Jane conceded.
Kirsty grinned. ‘Then why’n’t you both just go and have a roll behind that hedge and leave me alone, eh?’
‘Please, Kirsty.’ Jane leaned over her. ‘This is really important.’
Kirsty sat up. ‘All right. Siddown. Got any blow? Naw, forget it. Only kidding. Wouldn’t do at the vicarage, would it? Listen, I’ll go so far and no further, so don’t go asking me more stuff when I say no. And you keep me out of this, right? Else I’ll come after you with the four-ten.’
‘OK.’ Jane sat down in the mown grass. Kirsty with a shotgun – that was entirely believable. ‘We never even spoke to you.’
‘This thing, it got out of hand, right? I went so far with it then I was out. Finished. I even tried to bust it all up, but that didn’t work. So that was it, I was outer there. Plus, I mean, in school you need diversions, right? You gotter have things to get you through it. Though I don’t need that now, do I? I look like I got time to mess with the mind of some stupid little cow?’
‘No,’ Jane said.
‘All right, well, it’s simple enough. Layla knew some things about Shelbone, look – about her parents, her real parents.’
‘How did she—?’ Eirion began, but Jane put a warning hand on his knee and he shut up.
‘Like, for instance, that her dad knifed her ma to death in this church,’ Kirsty said.
Jane clutched at the hay.
‘Both of them bloody junkies. Both parents junkies and her dad’s a murderer – and Shelbone’s this holier-than-thou, pain-in-the-arse, stuck-up little cow who’d grass you up to the teachers soon as—Unbelievable, ennit?’
‘Where did this happen?’ Eirion asked.
‘Somewhere up the Midlands? Not round yere.’
‘In a church?’ Jane felt numb.
‘Now Layla, she had a very good reason to bring down that family. On account it was Shelbone’s ol’ man, her adopted ol’ man that messed it up when Layla done that gypsy thing at the Christmas Fair.’
‘I wasn’t there. I was sick.’
‘Well, I’ll tell you, Jane, that was real scary, that stuff she was coming out with. When she gets in that gypsy gear, it’s like she’s another person. Wouldn’t have my fortune told by her, no way. But that’s beside the point. The point is ol’ man Shelbone protests that it’s unChristian and he gets it stopped. So in Layla’s view they all got it coming to them now, big-time. Gypsies don’t forget, right? And she done me a few favours, mostly money, you know? So I couldn’t say no.’
‘To helping her stage the ouija?’
‘But, after a while, I could tell this was fucking the kid up, serious.’
Merrily gazed over the glass waterfall that was Allan Henry’s home. She thought about getting out, going for a meditative walk around, with a cigarette. Perhaps there was something obvious she was missing.
‘Where’s her mother stand in all this?’ she asked suddenly.
‘Sandra Henry,’ Sophie said. ‘Sandra Riddock?’
‘You know her?’
‘Not personally, but she worked for an estate agency where my sister was manager for a while. It was how she met Henry. They were the agents for one of his first shoddy housing estates – twelve, fifteen years ago? She was quite a beauty, apparently. I remember my sister saying that no one knew she even had a child, then.’
‘The father was a gypsy, Jane says.’
‘I wouldn’t know. But you’re right – I do wonder if Sandra Henry knows what her daughter’s been up to.’
‘I wonder if she’s in. I wonder if she’s down there now – on her own. I wonder if Layla’s away, supposedly staying with friends or something equally suspicious.’
Sophie stiffened. ‘On what basis would we be calling on her?’
‘We? Well, me, I’d have to play it straight. I’m a minister of the Church. I’ve just found out my daughter’s been involved in experiments to contact the dead, along with Mrs Henry’s daughter and a girl who attempted suicide. As a priest I’m naturally very worried about that. What’s she going to do, laugh it off, turn me away?’
‘You’d be using Jane.’
‘I’m not using Jane. Jane didn’t even tell me about it. Dennis did.’
‘All right.’ Sophie started the car. ‘Let’s try and find the entrance to the drive. I’m told it isn’t obvious. I won’t say “On your head be it.” It’s both our heads.’
‘You’re a mate, Soph.’
‘Oh, shut up.’ Sophie pulled into the lane, drove very slowly down the hill. It was very quiet; there were no other houses or farms in the vicinity. No cows or sheep grazed the hill. As far as Merrily could recall, no other vehicle had passed them since they’d stopped.
‘Likes his privacy.’
‘Evidently.’ Sophie stopped opposite a tarmacked opening on the right. ‘You think this is it?’
‘Try it.’
Sophie drove into the entrance – the deep shade of big forest trees immediately closing over the car. After about fifty yards they came to the perimeter wall with its railings on top, a couple of brick gateposts, eight or so feet high, with metal gates, open. A black sign on the left-hand post decreed, in yellow lettering, NO UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY.
‘Probably be security cameras, somewhere,’ Sophie guessed. They passed a small bungalow with a van outside. ‘Staff there, I expect. We supposed to check in, I wonder?’
‘Nobody about, anyway. Carry on.’
On the left was a clearing in the trees. Sophie braked.
‘Good
heavens. Either it’s a reproduction or a museum piece.’
‘Or Layla’s dad’s dropped in.’
The vardo stood alone. It was crimson and gold, like an outsize barrel organ. It had ornate, gilt-ribbed panels, a porch with side-brackets like golden wheels, and brass carriage lamps. The windows had intricately patterned shutters. The vardo looked immaculate, out of a children’s picture book.
Really has thrown money at her, Merrily thought. For a couple of seconds she even wondered if Amy Shelbone was in there with Gypsy Layla.
‘Too easy,’ Sophie murmured, and drove on.
After a few yards, the full sky reappeared as the drive widened into a forecourt with three vehicles in it: a Range Rover, a black Porsche Carrera and a small sleek yellow sports car. There was a flight of about five stone steps up to a front door that was about the size and thickness of the one accessing Ledwardine Church.
A man came down the steps. Merrily got out of the car.
‘I’m looking for Mrs Henry.’
‘Are you, indeed?’ He wore jeans and an old cheesecloth shirt, open to the waist. Gardener? Handyman? Security?
‘This is the right house, isn’t it?’ Merrily said.
‘And you are?’
‘My name’s Merrily Watkins.’
He nodded slowly, waiting.
‘I just wanted to talk to Mrs Henry on a private matter. I would’ve rung first, but it’s ex-directory.’
‘So it is,’ he said. ‘Well, she’s not here.’ He looked her up and down like she might have a set of burglar’s tools under her jacket. ‘Maybe I can help.’ He put out a slow hand. ‘Allan Henry.’
Kirsty Ryan said she’d first started to get cold feet when she realized that Amy Shelbone had actually not known about her real dad killing her mother until they pulled the spirit scam on her in Steve’s shed.
‘Even Layla was surprised how easy she went for it. We’d give her a bit of a spirit message from her ma, and she’d write it all down, like it was tablets of stone, and next day, half-twelve on the dot she’d come scampering across the field, desperate to contact her ol’ lady again – I’m saying ol’ lady, she was just a kid herself when the bastard carved her up. I was getting pissed off with it. I mean, a joke’s a joke, but you don’t let it take over your life.’
‘Whose life?’ Eirion asked.
‘She needed it as much as the kid by then.’
‘Layla?’
‘Don’t get the idea she’s playing at this, mate.’ Kirsty pushed a hand through her foxy hair. ‘She’s into the gypsy thing in a big way. Whole shelves of books, wardrobes full of exotic clobber – the veils and the hats and the flouncy skirts. She got crystals and a dozen packs of Tarot cards. She got her own gypsy caravan. She mixes herbs and things. She’ll do you a love token to get the bloke you want – involving locks of your hair and his hair and ribbons and stuff. Calls herself a shuvani, a gypsy sorcerer. Like – OK – once, there was this bloke I fancied and I wanted to know if I was wasting my time, right? Layla’s like, OK, wait for the right time of the month, gimme a Tampax—’
Jane recoiled. ‘Gross!’
‘We make this necklace of beads out of clay and menstrual blood. I was supposed to hang it on the guy’s locker and then if the beads had like dissolved by morning it meant he wasn’t gonner be interested. In the end, I bottled out, threw it away, said somebody must’ve nicked it. I mean – what?’
‘She really believes this stuff?’ Eirion said.
‘It’s her life, mate.’
‘So she didn’t think it was entirely a scam – the spiritualism?’
‘It started out that way, like I said. But when it began to work, when the kid’s really gone for it, she’s like, “Oh this is how it happens, this is how it happens.” You know?’
‘Not really.’
‘It was like she believed the kid’s ma really was in touch. Now, she believes she’s got the power. All the things she told people at the Christmas Fair, ever since, she’s been like, “Oh, Mrs So-and-So just died, you hear that? I told her she was gonner die!” Going on like that.’
Jane shivered.
‘They’re really cooking, you know, her and the kid. I don’t know how she found out about the murder, I really don’t. But then she reckons a load of other stuff’s coming through that she didn’t know. Layla is very excited, not that you’d know that, if you en’t known her as long as me. Come the holidays, no way does she wanner let go of little Shelbone. That afternoon, after the heavy mob crash into Stevie’s shed and bust us up, I’m like, right, that’s it, you can count me out, sister, I got better things to do. But she’s already making other arrangements.’
‘So you haven’t been in contact with Layla since school broke up?’ Jane said.
‘She rang me a couple of times. I said I was too busy? Next thing, I hear about the kid chucking up in church – well, nobody knew what that was about except me. I thought, this has gone too far. This is well over the bloody top. Next thing I hear, she’s tried to do away with herself. That’s spooky, ennit?’ Kirsty stood up. ‘There it is. You got the lot now.’
Eirion said, ‘You’ve known Layla a long time then?’
‘All my life, give or take. We were at the same little school at Eardisley. Course, they weren’t rich then, her and her ma. When Allan Henry come on the scene, he wanted to take her away from Moorfield to some private school, but she wouldn’t go.’
‘You never met her father?’
‘She never met her father. She used to have like fantasies about him, this mysterious gypsy. He was probably some travelling scrap-metal dealer, but she had him roaming Europe in his romantic caravan, seducing women with love potions and doing the business.’
‘The business?’
‘The magic. Doing the magic for his friends and cursing his enemies. She got all the books, and whenever there was gypsies in the area she’d spend hours with them. She even went off with the buggers once for two nights, her ma went bloody spare. And then… Oh yeah – she cursed a teacher once. We had this gym teacher at Moorfield, Mrs Etchinson. Gave us a hard time. Gave everybody a hard time – team spirit, all this shit. Layla was never a team player.’
‘Cursed her how?’ Jane asked. ‘This was probably before my time.’
‘It must’ve been before your time, because everybody knew about it. I dunno what she did. The evil eye, the bad words… grave-dirt in an envelope.’
‘What happened?’
‘Put it this way – within a few months it was confirmed she’d got multiple sclerosis. Not good for a gym teacher.’
‘That takes years to come on,’ Eirion pointed out. ‘She must have had it already.’
‘That was what we said,’ Kirsty said. ‘But it does makes you think, don’t it?’
It didn’t give Jane a good feeling. She stood up, too. ‘What did she do for Steve, to get him to lend her his shed?’
‘More what she didn’t do, if you ask me,’ Kirsty said enigmatically. ‘Like being considerate enough not to shrivel his genitals.’
‘But she’s still seeing Amy?’
‘Look, all I know is, when she rang me she said Amy was coming out to meet her at night. Like really at night – when her parents were in bed. She’d ring Amy on the little phone that Amy kept under the pillow, and Layla would say the word and Amy would be up and dressed and out the front door and Layla would pick her up at the bottom of the lane.’
‘Where would they go? I mean she’d need somewhere with a table, to lay all the letters out and—’
‘No way,’ Kirsty said scornfully. ‘That is history.’
‘What?’
‘That’s primitive stuff, now. They got well beyond the glass and the little bloody letters.’
‘What’s that mean?’
‘You don’t wanner know, Jane.’ Kirsty started to walk away. She looked back over her beefy shoulder. ‘Or, more to the point, I don’t wanner know.’
33
Item
ALLAN HENRY’S SITTING room had one wall that was all plate glass, perhaps forty feet long. It had wide green views across to one of the conical, wooded humps known as Robin Hood’s Butts. Appropriately, according to legend, the Butts had been dumped there by the Devil, making him Hereford’s first sporadic developer.
‘And this is your…’ Allan Henry studied Sophie, evidently trying to decide whether she was mother or sister.
‘Secretary,’ Sophie said quickly and firmly. She and Merrily were at either end of a white leather four-seater sofa, one of two in the vast snowy room. Under their feet was a pale grey rug with an unusual design – a tree growing through the centre of a wheel.
Merrily didn’t recall ever seeing Sophie looking more agitated. Sophie wanted out of here. Sophie was Old Hereford to the core; to her this man was the Devil.
‘Vicars have secretaries now?’ Allan Henry said.
‘Sophie works for the Cathedral,’ Merrily told him.
‘And what do you do, Mrs Watkins? Specifically.’
‘Erm… official title: Deliverance Consultant. I’m afraid I don’t have a card or—’
‘Or a dog collar. So what is a—?’
‘It’s somebody who deals with problems of a paranormal nature,’ Merrily said, for once without embarrassment. ‘Used to be Diocesan Exorcist.’
His eyes widened. ‘They still do that?’
‘It’s never gone away, Mr Henry.’
‘Well…’ He leaned against the towering brick inglenook, long mirrors either side of it reflecting the greenery. ‘I’m now trying to think if I have a problem of a paranormal nature. Let’s see… when things go bump in the night, I can usually explain it. And although I often have people leeching off me, I wouldn’t call them vampires. Can I offer you both a glass of wine?’ He laughed. ‘That is, can I offer you each a glass of wine.’
‘Thank you, but I’m driving,’ Sophie said quickly.
‘And I’ll be driving in a short while,’ Merrily said.
‘Not even one glass?’
‘Not even one between us. Honestly, we don’t have very long. We’ve got a number of parents to see.’
‘Oh, parents, is it?’