by Phil Rickman
‘You’re mental, Kairsty, you know that?’
Safest to go on the offensive. An advantage of being separated was the way you could bring a row directly to the boil, knowing you could slip away, with nothing lost, before the first plate hit the wall.
‘I don’t think so.’ Her eyes cold as quartz. ‘I mean, I could almost feel insulted if that cow’s as far as your ambition goes, but being I know what a sad little sod you’ve become, it doesn’t surprise me a great deal, Frank, to be honest.’
‘I’m going.’
Bliss’s palms starting to sweat.
‘Calling the shots now, is she, on your private life?’
‘Think whatever you want.’
‘As I understand it, with a male officer and a woman, it’s always the man has to move, isn’t it? Or have I got that wrong?’
‘What exactly do you want off me?’
And she’d smiled. Generously.
‘Just want you to own up to it, Frank, that’s all.’ Oh, the satisfaction in her eyes. ‘Dad’s solicitor says that makes it a lot easier. Play your cards right, it might not come out in public’
Oh sure.
‘Just makes it easier, that’s all,’ Kirsty said.
‘And costlier. For me, anyway.’
Kirsty had shrugged, Bliss feeling like his insides had been flushed out with cold water. Kirsty blamed the police for everything that had gone wrong between them. She was wrong about that, and she probably knew she was wrong, but this was convenient, and she’d use it.
‘Close friend, Billy?’
Dr Grace, who was very well-connected, glanced over his shoulder at Bliss. ‘Not particularly a friend at all, Francis, but everybody’s at least acquainted in this county. Except, possibly, for uncouth incoming Scousers like yourself.’
‘You mean a Masonic thing?’ Bliss said.
Dr Grace declined to reply, turning back to his work, lifting a distended flap of skin like he was opening a Jiffy bag full of blood, and Bliss turned away.
‘Big family, mind, Billy. Branches everywhere. The Bulls, Bull-Morrises, Bull-Davieses…’
‘Small county.’
‘And a big house for one man.’
‘Two marriages, Francis. Both childless. Not what a farmer wants. Well, now, I’d say that was pointing at him as culprit, but not the kind of man to have his sperm tested. Almost certainly would’ve been a third wife. Never a man to look back, Mansel.’
‘He didn’t see this coming,’ Bliss said.
‘Ah now…’ Billy Grace turned, beaming, a loose, shambling man with big white teeth, a wild, neon smile. ‘Actually, he did. He must’ve been facing directly into it.’
‘What you offering?’
‘Not a penknife, Francis. Machete, more like.’
‘That’s urban, Billy.’ Bliss took a step back. ‘That’s frigging gangland.’ Mr Sollers Bull thinks a gang. ‘Go on then, doc. Give me the guesswork.’
Billy Grace lurched to his feet. Thimbles of blood on the fingers of his surgical gloves.
‘The neck – one blow, looks like. A single slash. I’m guessing that came first, while he was still on his feet. The blows to the top of the head would’ve put him straight down.’
Billy took a couple of long strides into the middle of the farmyard, all the uniforms and techies moving away as his right arm went back for role-play.
‘If you imagine he’s standing here when the blade makes contact, slamming into the windpipe. Not exactly what you’d call a butcher’s strike, but the sheer impact of it would leave the poor bastard reeling, spouting blood and tissue everywhere. A great dollop… as you see.’
Billy gestured at the separate puddle. Bliss felt queasy.
‘Poor old Mansel tottering away, couple of metres and then…’ He began to back off unsteadily. ‘ Bang, on the skull, and Mansel comes down like a block of flats.’
Bliss said, ‘And the killer…?’
‘Just watches.’
‘Watches?’
‘Well, obviously, I don’t know that, but… I’ll be able to give you a full list of injuries and possibly confirm the sequence tomorrow, but if you want to take a closer look…’
‘For now, I’ll take your word. So the killer knew he’d killed. There was serious intent…’
‘Hardly trying to fend the poor chap off.’
‘And then slinks away. With his big knife.’ Bliss turned to Terry Stagg, the wind in his face like barbed wire. ‘First light, we go over the whole frigging farm, inch by inch. I also think we’re gonna have to drag Howe away from her dinner party, or wherever. Gorra mad bastard here.’
‘Or someone pumped up with drugs.’ Billy’s teeth shining with carnivorous glee. ‘Whoever he is, Francis, I wouldn’t like to face him in an alley.’
Terry Stagg said, ‘Mr Sollers Bull… you need to know…’
‘Where is he?’
‘I suggested he went home. You go down to the fork in the drive, turn right-’
‘Where’ve I heard that name before, Terence? Sollers Bull…’
‘TV?’ Stagg said. ‘Pictures in the papers? I’ve been trying to tell you.’
Bliss turned. Billy Grace was grinning.
‘Oh shit,’ Bliss said. ‘He’s got form.’
‘That might be how you see it, Francis,’ Billy said. ‘But to quite a few people hereabouts, he’s a bloody hero.’
6
Exhaust
Even now, even in a room full of priests, it was hard to relive. Years later, it would still start burning in her memory like acid. If it caught her in the night, she’d have to get out of bed and pray. Recite St Patrick’s Breastplate, the way she had the night Denzil Joy died.
‘Let me set the scene for you,’ Huw Owen said to the students. ‘When Merrily were appointed as deliverance consultant, the man she replaced was the last Diocesan Exorcist. His name were Canon Dobbs and he couldn’t be doing wi’ namby-pamby terminology like deliverance.’
He paused, looking down to the darkest part of the chapel again.
‘An austere owd bugger, Dobbs. Former academic. Not a supporter of the ordination of women. Merrily’s a university dropout who received her calling in the last days of a wonky marriage – he got killed in a car crash. Was there an element of guilt after that? I wouldn’t like to spec-’
‘Huw-’
‘Always an element of summat, in’t there? We’re all on the threshold of imbalance. As this job keeps reminding us.’
She saw his left hand quiver. And again he looked out towards the shadows in the left-hand corner, where Merrily could see a man now, leaning back, an arm thrown across the back of the empty chair next to his.
‘Anyroad, Canon Dobbs felt it were his duty to expose the upstart bint to the kind of evil the very existence of which would be denied by the progressive bishop who’d appointed her. And – happen – by some of you. Lass?’
Huw extended an arm. Merrily stood up.
‘Erm… I don’t know whether anybody here’s ever been a nurse. Or knows one. But I’ve found it’s always useful to listen to nurses.’
A rush of wind hit the chapel and there was a distant splintering, all heads turning except for Huw’s.
‘Not least because they’ve seen most things relating to death. This, erm, this is about a death. It was my first deliverance job and probably should’ve been Canon Dobbs’s last before he retired, but he was… unavailable.’
Merrily was already uncomfortable. All she had to do was lift the cellar hatch of memory, just a crack, and out it sprang again, and she could almost feel it on the underside of her wrist.
Scritch-scratch.
The smell coming back at once: cat-shit and gangrene, one of the nurses had said.
‘Mr Joy was a hospital patient in Hereford, and he didn’t have long. I was called out in the night because the nurses said he was asking for a priest and the hospital chaplain wasn’t available. The truth was that it was the nurses who needed the priest.’
The nurses who didn’t like to touch Mr Joy. The nurses who had seen the way he used his wife when she came to visit.
The nurses who never could forget the sensation of his fingers when they bent over him to take his temperature or change one of the tubes.
Scritch-scratch. On the soft skin on the underside of the wrist.
‘But I was new at this,’ Merrily said. ‘I told them it wasn’t my job to judge him, only to try and bring him peace. Something was still insisting, back then, that there was no such thing as an evil presence.’
A hand went up. Shona, the woman who’d been a prison governor, hair like a light brown balaclava.
‘You mean your own life-experience or your training?’
‘Look,’ Merrily said. ‘Here you are at the bedside of a dying man. He ’s dying, you’re a priest, there to bring comfort. How can you do that if you accept that he’s infested with evil? So you go with the rational view. No such thing as an abstract, incorporeal evil. You need to relax.’
He can enter you without moving, that man, one of the nurses had said.
Merrily’s hand instinctively moving to the pectoral cross. Don’t shudder. Do not shudder now.
‘Cut to the car chase, lass,’ Huw said. ‘And don’t omit the exhaust.’
She told them the rest. Well, most of it.
Trying to convey that sense of all the light in the room being sucked sourly into a man on the very rim of extinction, whose touch was like an enema.
‘Looking back, it leaves me asking a number of questions. Fierce sexual energy coming from an old, dying man – can that be explained medically? Possibly it can, I’m not qualified to say, but the nurses didn’t think so, and nurses, no matter how compassionate, can be very cynical people.’
It was quieter now, the wind in remission.
‘The psychological explanation,’ Merrily said, ‘might be that here was a man who’d enjoyed exploiting women sexually, degrading them. A man in search of increasingly perverse pleasures – to what extent you want to demonize this is up to you.’
Huw was looking at her, head on one side. OK, I’m coming to it.
‘You can usually find a rational explanation, but there has to be a cut-off point. You need to recognize when you’re trying too hard to explain something away, because that can be when you’re most vulnerable. And if it reaches you, there’s not much hope for whoever you’re trying to protect.’
Shona said, ‘When you say “if it reaches you”…?’
‘What do I mean by it? Not sure. But I think if you’re unable to accept the premise of an external evil, you may not be able to deal with some problems. I think… looking back, I don’t think I handled it forcefully enough. I let the psychology make too many decisions. And afterwards I failed to draw a line under it, as a result of which… something… seemed to be hanging around, for some time.’
Looking at Shona, hoping she’d ask another question, move the thread.
Nobody spoke.
‘I felt unclean. Bad dreams. Night… sensations. Subjective, you might say, psychological. I’ve since encountered criminals, accepted as being disturbed, and this was just an ordinary old man. Yet Mr Joy was a notorious case in that hospital. Canon Dobbs had had dealings with him before and could have done so this time, but he set me up.’
She didn’t want to go into the burning of garments, and no way was she going to tell them about the essential advice which had come not from Huw but from an old woman who’d lived in a care home and who’d been surrounded by some very dubious books. Wouldn’t help anybody. Although it had helped her.
Maybe seeing she was floundering, Huw stood up.
‘The point being,’ he said, ‘that it might’ve been years before Merrily encountered owt as extreme as that – if ever. Make or break, and Dobbs is expecting break. I’d still say that were irresponsible of him.’
Heads turned at a slow creaking sound from outside, some distance away but ominous.
‘Another tree coming down,’ Huw said. ‘Nowt we can do.’
‘It’s like a series of doors,’ Merrily said. ‘You start off opening the psychological door, and sometimes that’s as far as you need to go, and it ends with prayers and a blessing. But quite often, several doors down the line, you’ll come to one that a psychologist wouldn’t go through.’
She drank some water.
‘I don’t know, to this day, whether Mr Joy was afflicted with some violent sexual anomaly which had more or less eaten away his humanity. Or whether that had opened him up to something else. But you don’t have to. That’s why we have the rituals and the liturgy. To an extent… just do it. Without it, you’d be off the rails.’
The posh girl – did the card say Bethany? – had her hand up.
‘What happened finally? Were you there when he-?’
The wind had started up again but now it was less ferocious, as if slightly dismayed at what it had done. The big gust which had brought down the tree had also driven clouds away from the moon. It flared suddenly in the lowest window and lit the face of the man at the back. Briefly, before he slid into the adjacent chair.
The man at the back of the chapel had flat, grey hair and his eyes still looked like they’d been sewn on. No bags, no wrinkles. A soft-toy’s eyes.
Bloody hell.
‘He died that night,’ Merrily said. ‘I was there, yes. Nurses will often tell you stories about the dying being… helped over. Claiming they can see the faces of people they’ve known. Parents, old friends, grannies. Brain chemicals, if you like, comfort visions. Lots of rational explanations, but it keeps happening. Someone to beckon you over.’
‘And was there someone waiting for Mr Joy?’
‘At the end, he was conspicuously disturbed. As if he could see something which… didn’t seem like his granny.’
‘Did you see anything?’
‘No. And I came away, as I’ve implied, with a quite acute sense of failure. Sat and smoked a cigarette with the ward sister. Both of us fairly shattered after watching an old man who’d scared us all… go out in a state of abject terror.’
Shona said, ‘And when, subsequently, you felt that something of this man hadnae gone away… do you think this sense of failure might’ve been a contributory factor?’
‘Haunted by my own inadequacy?’
Nobody followed up on this. Merrily glanced at Huw, sitting with his eyes half-closed. She had that sense of being set up, manoeuvred into place, as surely as she had with the late Canon Dobbs.
‘Were you afraid,’ the girl, Bethany, said, ‘when you thought something was coming for him?’
‘Hard not to be. He was.’
‘Afraid for your immortal soul? Or afraid that you weren’t going to be able to handle the job?’
‘Mmm.’
‘And what did you do about that?’
‘I don’t know,’ Merrily said. ‘It’s never gone away.’
Huw was nodding.
‘You’re always afraid?’ Bethany said. ‘Whenever you’re asked to deal with…’ Her face, at last, showing dismay.
‘Pretty much,’ Merrily said.
Glancing towards the guy at the back, half expecting to see a spiral of smoke. Remembering a summer afternoon in a big church in the Malvern Hills, the vicar there finishing off his cigarette, leaving little cylinders of ash at the foot of the lectern. Remembering what he’d said that day.
Not a lot frightens me. I can deal with most physical pain, emotional pain, stress.
He’d probably done his training up here in the Beacons, and the exercises prior to selection. It was said they had to run up to fifty miles with an eighty-pound pack and when they took their boots off their socks were thick with blood. I can achieve separation from the weakness of the body, he’d said that day in his church.
It was fairly clear now that he hadn’t been expecting to see her here. Maybe hoping to slide away quietly when the session had ended, so they wouldn’t have to meet? The moon had screwed that.
; He looked up at last, and their eyes met, and his were small and almost flat to his head like a teddy bear’s, and his smile was tentative, wary.
7
Old Evil
Fallen trees had restructured the landscape. Two of them were down on the hillside below the chapel, the biggest near the bottom of the track, just before it joined the main road. A crackling, skeletal mesh in the blurred moonlight.
Huw Owen was standing on a crag with a lambing lamp. Like one of Holman Hunt’s rejected sketches for The Light of the World, Merrily thought. Below him, a bunch of the deliverance students stood staring dumbly at the tangle of branches, like this was an act of God. Huw smiling thinly, as if he knew that it was.
Not that it would affect the students. They’d all walked up from the pub and the guest houses and B amp; Bs in the village, Huw from his rectory. Only someone who’d arrived late enough to have to park her old Volvo right outside the sodding chapel…
Bugger.
‘What this probably means,’ Merrily said, ‘is that I won’t get home tonight.’
The wind had died back to a murmur, like distant traffic. Huw came down from his crag.
‘Couple of lads’ll be up wi’ chainsaws, I expect.’
‘When?’
‘Soon as it’s light. I’ll make you a bed up. Won’t be silk sheets or owt, mind.’
She followed him across the rough and sodden grass, popping the studs on her waxed coat, not liking to think what kind of damage there might be back home in Ledwardine. Huw stopped and looked back at her.
‘Country life. Like town life, wi’ extra shite.’
‘Don’t like Jane being on her own in the vicarage. I know she’s eighteen, but in my mind she’s ten.’
‘She’s got Robinson just across the street.’ Huw came to a wooden stile, waited, patting Merrily on the shoulder as she drew level. ‘You did bloody well tonight. Wouldn’t’ve worked the same coming from me.’
He balanced his lambing light on one of the stile’s posts and climbed over. She called after him.
‘You’re a bastard, Huw.’
Huw picked up the lamp, and the lamp picked up a razored track leading down towards the stone rectory, a grey boulder with a scree of crumbling outbuildings. Merrily scrambled up on the stile, the wind whipping at her hair. This was nothing – an hour ago she’d’ve been on hands and knees.