by Phil Rickman
Huw whispered, ‘Call him.’
Merrily said, ‘Fergus.’
Huw and Lol had dragged over one of the rubber mats and then folded a dust sheet and laid it on top, Lol squeezing her hand and leaving something in it.
‘Where do you want me?’ Fergus said.
‘Might be as well if you just knelt. If that’s not too uncomfortable.’
‘I try to keep myself flexible, Merrily.’
‘Good.’
Fergus knelt. She stood. She still didn’t have far to gaze down on his open, bony face, his wide-apart brown eyes. Had he? Was any of this even conceivable? She saw how long and bony his hands were, knuckles like ball—
‘If you could move a little closer to the altar.’ She wanted it so the two candles lit the upper part of his face, so that she could see his eyes.
It was always going to be the eyes.
Very quietly, Huw was removing from the bag two items: the white diary of Lynsey Davies and a small picture, the miniature in its slender frame, and he was edging silently along the dust- sheeted wall towards the entrance. He could leave this to the lass.
He had to.
Huw crept away, to be on his own. He hadn’t eaten for more than a day now. He’d awoken at five a.m. in the dark, and had spent nigh on three hours in meditation at the window. His room had faced east – she were thoughtful like that, the lass – and before the dawn came he’d established inside himself a centre of calm to which periodically, during the day, he’d returned.
His head was light now, filled with this quiet incandescence that was still linked to his spine as he padded down the body of the chapel, arriving at the side of the door. Standing there with his back to a hanging dust sheet, looking down to the altar at the opposite end of the chapel where, between the shapes of the people gathered there, he could see the candlelight, as remote from him now as starlight.
He placed the diary on the flagstones at his feet and held the miniature for a few moments in both hands. Too dark to see it, but the image was clear to him. He could see the face of Donna Furlowe sketched by her mother in pale grey pastel on white paper, so that it was like an imprint on a sheet. Or a shroud.
Huw knelt and, clasping the picture to his heart, held it there behind his hands as he put them together to pray.
With the bulbs out, there was a vague ball of light around them; Merrily could barely see anyone else.
‘Our Father…’
She said the Lord’s Prayer, the old exorcism, for the second time, slowly, and she could hear the others joining in, a grounded echo. She saw that Fergus was mouthing some of the words but not all of them, as if finding them difficult to remember. He looked briefly puzzled.
Merrily said, ‘Deliver us, merciful Lord, from all evils, past and present and to come, and grant us peace in our day. Keep us free from sin and safe from all distress…’
Fergus knelt with his heavy, proud head raised up like the prow of a Viking longboat, his eyes closed. Where was he? Where were his thoughts taking him?
Merrily floundered, sought out Huw’s shadow, couldn’t see him anywhere, but she thought she heard his whisper: ‘Confession.’
Yes, she thought, of course.
‘Almighty God, in penitence we confess that we have sinned against you, through our own fault, in thought, word and deed…’
No penitence, no regrets, course there wasn’t. He was what he was, no getting round that. He’d scratched it out on the wall of his cream-painted cell at Winson Green: Freddy the mass murderer from Gloucester.
Gloucester, not Hereford, them days was long gone. He’d picked Gloucester; made his home there, made it hisself, filled it full of hisself and what he’d took – bringing bits of Gloucester home.
Some nights he’d go back to Number 25 – not to the place it was now, look, emptied and gutted by the bloody coppers, but what it used to be, full of sweat and heat… vibrating with it.
Him too. He was strong then, at his peak, ready for anything: work hard, play hard, that was him.
Now he’d lost a lot of weight, didn’t feel too good no more. Not here in this shithole, no privacy, nothing to see, nothing to watch. Nothing to watch here but him – people looking at him all the bloody time, having a laugh, the laughs echoing across the exercise yard – ‘Build us a patio, Fred? Ho ho!’
Days fading into more days, going nowhere, never going nowhere again. Never working for hisself again, no more building things with his hands. Nothing to do with his hands no more.
No women, no more women ever. No wife. When they was in court, she wouldn’t look at him – after all he’d done for her, trying to keep her out of it, telling the coppers she didn’t know nothing. And she en’t talking to them neither. And him… he’s talked enough. All he’s got left now’s his secrets – the who and the when and the where. The how-many-times. They don’t know next to nothing, when you works it out, en’t got the half of it and that’s all right by him – Freddy the mystery man. Freddy the mass murderer from Gloucester.
And Huw stood there in the gutted chapel, and he could hear the voice well enough, but he couldn’t feel anything. No energy. All he was getting was the husk in the prison cell on New Year’s Day, 1995. The day the prison officer couldn’t get the cell door open because of what was hanging behind it from a rope made out of – versions differed – a prison blanket, or prison shirts.
This was the very worst crime to be committed against the relatives of every missing girl in Britain: allowing him to do it – letting Fred escape, with all his secrets.
Why hadn’t they – the police, the prison authorities – put the psychology together, realized just how depressed he was likely to become without the anticipation of gross and grosser sexual excesses to heat his blood? Had nobody guessed he’d become empty, a husk, insubstantial enough to hang?
Maybe they had. Maybe they just bloody had. He’d heard of coppers who’d cheered when they’d heard about the death at Winson Green. A banner going up: Nice one, Fred – something as inane as that.
And now nobody would know the who, the where, the how- many. Lynsey had written her secrets down, in the Magickal Diary, but amiable, garrulous Fred had been barely literate, and Rose was saying nowt.
Freddy, the man of mystery, and those who followed him: Lynsey and the others, the unknown others who’d lived in Cromwell Street or had just dropped in for an hour or two, and would never be identified now. Out there, with the virus inside them.
Huw stared into the darkest corner of the chapel, listening for the remains of the laughter and the sniggers, the sound of a hammer, thrown from a ladder, clanging on the flags.
He heard nothing but the drone of Merrily’s ad hoc ritual, useless in itself.
It was all useless. There was nobody watching, nothing worthy of a fight.
Huw held the pastel drawing of Donna, by Julia, close to his aching heart, thinking of all the relatives and friends and lovers of long-missing girls and women who did something like this every night. And he broke down.
At some point, Fergus’s eyes opened, and Merrily came in at once with the ritualized question, ‘What do you want from God in his Holy Church?’
Fergus, unprepared, made no reply at first. While she waited, she could hear the wind outside, coming down off Howle Hill. Sam Hall’s line came into her head: insidious wind. Where was Sam? She couldn’t see him. Where was Lol? All she could see were Fergus’s eyes, looking into hers.
‘I want,’ Fergus said, ‘what I deserve.’ He smiled at her.
Merrily felt a hollowness in her stomach. She gripped the angel pendant and felt the weight of her pectoral cross.
‘Do you renounce the Devil and all the spiritual forces of wickedness that rebel against God?’
Fergus kept smiling. ‘Sure.’
‘Do you renounce all the evil powers of this world that corrupt and destroy what God has created?’
‘I… yes,’ Fergus said. ‘Of course.’
‘Do you renounce a
ll sinful desires that draw you away from the love of God?’
When he hesitated, Merrily saw that he was looking at her breasts. Then he looked up.
‘Oh yes,’ he said.
The heat from the pendant went right up her arm. She looked into his eyes, then, and knew.
What a cliché that was: seen it in his eyes, windows of the soul – all that stuff.
In Fergus’s eyes, she saw nothing at all. A void. An absence. It was like opening the doors of a lift and finding that you were looking directly down the shaft. The absence that could now only be filled with life and energy when his hands were exploring you, when the eyes were lighting up like little torch bulbs. When he was swimming towards you through a pool of liquid lust.
Merrily knew that she was seeing what Lynsey Davies had seen, been surprised and probably delighted by, in the second before he came for her with… what?
A thin belt was the pathologist’s suggestion, according to Bliss, but no belt had ever been found. Perhaps it was Roddy’s – Fergus bending over the unconscious Roddy, as if to help him, sliding the belt out of his trousers. And then subduing Lynsey with his fists. She saw blood jetting from Lynsey’s nose and then the image cut to the belt, each end wrapped around one of Fergus’s hands and then its length pulled tight around Lynsey’s throat.
Silence soaked her head and then, over it, she heard, quite clearly and crisply:
Show you what’s what, where the bits goes, you little smart bitch…
‘Do you renounce—?’
‘Yes, of course. I renounce everything.’ Fergus smiled. ‘Is that it?’
‘That’s up to you,’ she said.
‘Oh, I’m sure that will do.’ Fergus stood up. ‘Thank you, Merrily. I imagine we all feel so much better for that.’
And he walked out of the glow and into the darkness.
‘Laughing,’ Ingrid Sollars said. ‘Laughing at us. Didn’t you feel that?’
‘I didn’t feel anything. There wasn’t anything to feel.’ Merrily turned to the altar and saw that the candles had gone out. But her eyes had long since adjusted; it seemed much lighter in here, and she could see Ingrid and Sam and Lol quite plainly. ‘Were we all expecting a confession?’
‘He’s not that dumb,’ Sam said. ‘All the people who know the truth are dead. Hell, I can see it all now. The panic Roddy musta been in – a killing he didn’t recall, a body on the floor right here. What’s he gonna do? Maybe they even advised him, Fergus and Piers – you can’t bury her here, buddy, all these excavations we’re gonna have. Must surely be someplace you’ve been working lately where you could stash her.’
‘Mmm.’
Merrily walked away, looking for Huw, whose idea this had been… and what a pointless exercise. She was disappointed in him – which she knew was wrong; he was just a man, with a burden. Perhaps what she was really avoiding was her disappointment in God, into whose hands this had been placed, in the hope of a solution. And there was none, not really. No one had been redeemed.
‘Cola French,’ Sam Hall mused. ‘I recall her now. She’d stay some weekends with Piers, I guess, came along to the village hall with him sometimes. Bright kid. But what I wondered, Lol…’ He looked around. ‘Where’d he go?’
Lol?’
Merrily could see him across the chapel, quite clearly silhouetted against a dust sheet hanging from the ceiling. Silhouetted because there was a blush on the cloth, a warm glow inside it. Lol was gathering the cloth into his arms and pulling on it.
‘What’s happening?’ Ingrid said.
When the sheet came down, with a shower of dust and plaster fragments, Merrily saw it had concealed a Gothic window that was both tall and wide and had plain glass in it, and what she saw through the glass explained why it was now so bright in here.
Cherry Lodge was wearing her old parka, and her hair was matted to her forehead. She was panting. There was a pile of old tyres beside her and she lifted one quite easily and threw it into the flames.
‘We piled some tyres all around, first,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to see him go up, did I?’
A tractor was parked at the edge of the field, not far from the end wall of the Baptist chapel. It had a trailer attached, and there were more tyres on that.
‘Left over from the foot-and-mouth pyres,’ Cherry said. ‘Railway sleepers would’ve been better but there was no time for that, see. I don’t know what’ll happen if it goes out before he’s all gone.’
The flames, with the wind under them now, lit up the pylon at the bottom of the field. When Merrily and the others had first come out of the chapel, it had looked as though the pylon itself was alight, as though the flames were filling it up inside, turning it into some metal Wicker Man of the new millennium: sacrificial fire.
It had taken Merrily a long time to work out what was happening here. Ingrid Sollars had been the first to realize, showing no shock at all. ‘Mr Lomas,’ she said drily, ‘would be most offended.’
Underneath the stench of diesel and burning rubber, Merrily detected the worst smell of all – barbecue, roast pork, Nev.
She coughed into a hand and wondered if Gomer was here, among the small but swelling crowd, the bonfire-night crowd, ‘the villagers who would never in a million years have turned out for Roddy Lodge’s funeral.
‘The police’ve sent for the fire brigade.’ Cherry Lodge was smiling, tired but triumphant. ‘Too late now. Oh, they’ll probably think of something to charge us with, but we’re only doing what they all wanted, aren’t we?’
My fault, Merrily thought. Should have made sure the church was locked.
She saw Lol coming back from the chapel, with Huw. They walked across to the other side of the fire, where there were fewer people, and Merrily was sure she saw Huw throw something grey-white into the flames. The diary?
‘After we left you, we went straight back up to the farm, we did, and piled the tyres on the trailer with the diesel,’ Cherry said. A wild exhilaration there now. ‘And we built up the pyre, and then we went back to the church and just wheeled the coffin out on Mr Lomas’s bier and loaded him on the trailer and brought him back here. Nobody noticed. The police weren’t out in force yet, just a couple down by the grave.’
‘Your idea?’ Merrily asked.
‘Bit of both. He was very bitter, Tony was, about that protest, with the banners and the placards. Lived here longer than any of them and he gets treated like dirt. Very bitter, he was. And at Roddy too, of course.’
Let him be cremated. Empty his bloody ashes in the gutter. Catharsis, Merrily thought, a hand on her pectoral cross.
And the Lodges didn’t yet know that he was probably an innocent man.
Redemption.
Really?
She looked away. In the top corner of the field, where it was separated from the land that extended behind Roddy’s bungalow… was that a woman standing alone there against the wire fence, arms folded, very still, watching Roddy burn?
Or was it just a fence post, with an old, fraying rag caught in the wire, so that it blew back in the wind, like hair?
Epilogue
THE SKIN WAS softly sepia-toned, the crow’s-feet delicately faded out. There was an ethereal light around the head.
Angel of Our Days, it said above the picture of Merrily.
She shuddered. ‘I can’t even think where she got this one from.’
‘Of course, it’ll never be wiped now,’ Jane said. ‘You realize that? You’ll go on for ever, making rings around the world.’
‘Nothing goes on for ever,’ Merrily said. ‘Certainly not on the Internet.’
‘That’s true, in fact,’ said Eirion, who’d brought along the printout. ‘When somebody stops paying for the site, it’ll vanish overnight.’
‘You don’t know,’ Jane said. ‘Odd things happen.’
Merrily saw Eirion giving her his famous smile and guessed that they were holding hands under the table. Odd things happen. When did the kid last say something like that?
How quickly they recovered. The elasticity of young skin. Whereas crow’s feet only got deeper.
She stretched her legs under the table. It was the first time she’d felt able if not to relax, at least to sag. Like spending a few moments on a plateau where you could lie on your back and not see the abyss. Maybe this was the most she could hope for: the feeling of not, for a while, having to look into the abyss.
On the printout, underneath her picture, she read:
The Archangel Uriel is at this moment working on earth through Her servant, The Reverend Merrily Watkins, Deliverance Minister for the Diocese of Hereford on the border of England and Wales.
It is very unusual in the UK, where the women’s ministry is itself so very young, for a woman, especially one so youthful, to be elevated to this most important and spiritually crucial role.
We ask for your prayers to aid Merrily in what we believe to be the summit of her endeavour, the task for which she was chosen above all women.
We believe that a satanic male maleficence lives on and will be passed on again, unless Merrily Watkins is permitted to exorcize it at the laying down of Roddy Lodge in the village of Underhowle, Herefordshire.
You are requested to commence your prayers for Merrily NOW. By the grace of God, amen.
It was signed: The Daughters of Uriel. And the tone was ludicrously apocalyptic, and yet…
‘I failed her,’ Merrily said. ‘Don’t let anybody say otherwise. I did not get any of this right.’
‘You didn’t know,’ Jane said. ‘You couldn’t have known.’
‘All the praying I do, you’d think there’d’ve been a little divine intervention,’ Merrily said bitterly.
‘Don’t,’ Jane said sharply.
‘No. I’m sorry.’ Maybe there had been. How could any of them know?
Jane said, ‘Just because you’re a priest, it doesn’t have to happen through you. The other thing happened through Lol. I mean, didn’t it? It was Lol who exposed that guy.’
‘Yes.’ Merrily smiled. ‘And Lol hated every minute of it.’