The House of Susan Lulham (Kindle Single)

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Are you there… Susan?’

  Startling herself. She’d said that without thinking.

  But no going back now.

  ‘Suze?’

  Anita Wells stifled a cry, turned to the window with its smears and blotches and the hand prints. Merrily walked to the end of the terrace. Between the trees, across the new estate with its flickery wall-mounted TVs, the umber sky lay like oily sacking over the city

  ‘Suze. Listen to me. Just for a minute. Talk to Zoe for me. Tell her we can sort this out.’

  Gasping breaths from behind. Anita was bent forward, hands on hips, like she was about to be sick.

  And she probably had cause. Zoe wasn’t delusional in the expected way. This was Zoe proving she wasn’t as thick as Jonno thought, that she was actually quite clever. And had support. A friend.

  In the phone, there was a rush of laughter, like a gas-jet. In Merrily’s head, a flash image of another phone slicked with fresh blood, Susan Lulham on her knees, pulsing and spouting.

  ‘Suze, is Zoe with you?’

  No reply. In the background, she could hear TV voices. Anita Wells had turned to the window, was beating on the toughened glass with the heels of both fists and sobbing.

  ‘And Jonno?’ Merrily said. ‘Is Jonno there?’

  ‘Yesssss.’

  This sudden reply, swollen with… satisfaction?

  ‘Can I… could I speak to him, please?’

  Zoe giggled, and you could hear her moving around with the cordless, and…

  …snap, snap, snap in the phone…

  …as, inside the house of Susan Lulham, lights came on, one after the other, and those familiar visceral thuds introduced the theme tune from EastEnders.

  Heart jumping like a toad, Merrily looked up at the house and saw that the handprints in the now-illuminated living-room window were dark red and too big for a woman’s. As she backed away, the house seemed to shiver in her vision and then re-form, and the line of symmetrical windows above the conservatory was full of white light, like a row of perfect, crowned teeth, and the hardwood sills were deep gums the colour of raw liver.

  Part Two

  The type of person who is especially likely to remain

  earthbound after physical death is the one whose

  life…was dominated by selfish pursuits. Since their

  awareness was almost completely limited to their

  concerns they may fail to recognise the extreme

  change that has overtaken them… They become very

  indignant when they discover that their home is now

  occupied by a stranger…’

  MARTIN ISRAEL

  Exorcism

  8 Your mate

  Sometimes you could see a big storm coming from way off, dirty clouds assembling on the horizon. Sometimes you just turned to find a ball of lightning exploding at your shoulder.

  Shock? Was it? Was it really?

  She felt cold, sitting in the Freelander, watching the house fizzing with light, human shadows mingling at the upstairs windows. On less-discreet estates, neighbours would be shooting it all on their phones, because that was what you did now to separate yourself from what was happening. Reduce it all to the distance of television. Email the sequence to friends and relatives, put it on YouTube. This is them bringing her out, you can actually see the blood on her.

  Not here. Here, there would be quiet outrage, and an unspoken tingle of apprehension. That house. Again.

  Merrily felt disconnected, smoking a cigarette, watching the paper-suited crime scene personnel crawling like white maggots over the house of Susan Lulham. In Anita Wells’ kitchen, she’d given a brief statement to DC David Vaynor. Hadn’t gone well.

  ‘I gather you’ve, er, been to exorcize the house, Mrs Watkins?’

  ‘Look, can we get this right?’ She recalled tightening her little fists, words tumbling out like a confession. ‘Whatever it says on Facebook, I did not “exorcize the house.” An exorcism is not something you do without a lot of forethought and… and investigation… and consultation. I did a blessing.’

  And then there was a killing.

  ‘I’ve been in that house precisely once, at the request of Mrs Mahonie, who exaggerated what I’d done there. On social media.’

  And then there was a killing.

  ‘And why did you come back tonight?’

  ‘Because she kept ringing me and then hanging up, and I was worried about her state of mind. Having said that, I had no reason at all to imagine… not in my worst nightmare… Look, I didn’t even know her husband was back. I was worried about her, yes. But just her.’

  ‘And what were you planning to do?’

  Had she even known?

  ‘Just try and talk to her.’

  ‘Did you know there was a cut-throat razor in the house?’

  ‘What..? No!’

  ‘Did you have any reason to think that Mrs Mahonie might have wanted to harm her husband?’

  ‘None at all. I never met her husband. I met Zoe once. For a comparatively short period of time.’

  And then…

  ‘Would you mind staying around for a while, Mrs Watkins? My Senior Investigating Officer’s on his way. He might want to…’

  ‘I’m sure he will.’

  And then there was…

  Oh Jesus.

  Jesus, were you even there?

  * * *

  Frannie Bliss was wearing jeans, must’ve come straight come from home. He slid into the passenger seat as it started to rain - slow, considered-sounding plops landing unevenly on the windscreen. He was silent for a while. His face was in shadow as he took off his beanie.

  ‘Kirsty used to go to Suze’s salon.’

  His soon-to-be-ex wife.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Well, not in the old days. Not till she was playing away, now I think about it. See, if only I’d known - all the clues were in her hair. Stripey bits, you know?’

  ‘Stripey bits.’

  ‘Me thinking things were still more or less all right. Worra shite detective.’

  He didn’t think that for one minute. Be careful, Merrily thought. In a situation like this, even Bliss, with his rubber-mat Scouse accent, would not necessarily be someone you could trust.

  ‘So how—’ Dipping into her bag for another cigarette. ‘How’re you feeling now, Frannie? I mean, generally.’

  She hadn’t seen him for several weeks. Back then, he was still concealing the effects of brain-stem damage sustained while trying to make an arrest. He leaned back, gazing through the windscreen at a SOCO in what he liked to call a Durex suit unloading something from the van.

  ‘Better than I was, ta. Still affected by bright lights.’

  ‘Bright lights,’ she said. ‘White walls.’

  ‘Norra lorra white left on Mr Mahonie’s walls, Merrily.’

  She withdrew her hand from the bag, snapped it shut.

  ‘DC Vaynor was economical with the details.’

  ‘Cautious lad, Darth. You didn’t try to go in yourself, then?’

  ‘Hell, no.’

  ‘Lorra blood. Like if there was a petrol pump that served blood and you were squeezing it for a couple of minutes, down the walls, over the carpet.’

  ‘Thank you for that.’

  ‘It still surprises me. How much comes out. You know?’

  ‘Got Macbeth the same way, even after all those battles.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sorry, I’m…’

  ‘Shocked?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  She thought he nodded. A uniformed cop was standing by the van’s open back doors.

  Bliss said, ‘They’ll be bringing him out soon.’

  She shivered.

  ‘Beautifully sharp,’ Bliss said, ‘that razor.’

  ‘Oh God…’

  ‘I didn’t say that, yeah? I never mentioned a razor. That’s not being released.’

  ‘Understood. But, oh God, Frannie…’

  Like
she hadn’t been expecting this, but…

  ‘Looks like a couple of useful arteries in Mr Mahonie’s throat got severed,’ Bliss said. ‘Other cuts on his face and hands, but those seem to be what killed him. Airways filling up, and… Anyway, Mrs Mahonie also has significant razor-cuts - not life-threatening, not facially-disfiguring, but not pretty. She’ll be spending the night in A and E with a couple of uniforms watching over her like ministering angels.’

  ‘Self-inflicted? Zoe’s..?’

  ‘Why would you think that?’

  She said nothing. Bliss inclined his head towards her.

  ‘Because of Suze?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘Quite talkative with Darth before I got here. Telling him she must’ve picked up the razor in the bathroom and brought it downstairs. Though she doesn’t remember doing this. Just having it with her in the sitting room. In her hand, open.’

  ‘Whose razor was it?’

  ‘Her husband’s. She says.’

  ‘That doesn’t…’

  ‘No, doesn’t make a lorra sense to me either, that a man living in Susan Lulham’s old house would buy himself a cut-throat razor, but life, Merrily, is strange. Actually, the first thing Mrs M remembers - she says - is cutting herself. On the arms. Though not wanting to.’

  ‘Not wanting to.’

  He made a bleak little smiley noise.

  ‘Trying to stop herself doing it. But she can’t.’

  She stared through the streaming windscreen.

  ‘Struggling against a force that was acting on her,’ Bliss said.

  ‘That’s what she’s saying, is it?’

  ‘Struggling against it,’ Bliss said. ‘In a state of incomprehensible terror.’

  Bliss sniffed.

  ‘See, it isn’t as simple as people think, even to cut your own throat. But then…’ The seat creaking as Bliss shrugged. ‘…he wasn’t a big bloke, and she seems to be quite a strong woman.’

  ‘Have you talked to her?’

  ‘I’m leaving it to Darth. Why intrude on a blossoming friendship? You come across any cut-throat razors, Merrily, during your blessing of the house, maybe in the bathroom?’

  ‘I’ve already told… Darth. If I had, don’t you think it’s not unlikely I’d’ve raised the issue with her?’

  He turned towards her, his eyes in shadow.

  ‘But you did have a good idea what she was going to say, didn’t you?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  She found her hands had disappeared into her sleeves, holding the cuffs closed.

  ‘You knew Zoe Mahonie was gonna say she was, in some way, possessed by whatever remains of Susan Lulham. Because Mrs Wells says that when you were trying to talk to Zoe on the phone you called her Suze. You said, Suze, is Zoe with you?’

  ‘Yeah, but that…’ Lights shivered in the rivers of rain on the windscreen. ‘I was just trying anything. You know? To get a reaction. To get her to talk to me.’

  ‘And did she?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Which one of them? Zoe or—?’

  ‘Stop it.’

  ‘Merrily…’ Bliss shifted in his seat. ‘I’m your mate. This is nothing to what you’ve got coming..’

  She said nothing.

  ‘A routine blessing. That’s what you told Darth. First stage. No holy water.’

  ‘Actually, there was, but that means nothing.’

  ‘So, the question is…’

  ‘I know what the question is.’

  He sat up.

  ‘Here’s whichever smart-arse barrister gets to represent Zoe at Crown Court. You, Mrs Watkins, simply by performing this ritual, had confirmed Mrs Mahonie’s fears that her house was haunted by a previous occupant who killed herself with a cut-throat razor. Going to deny that, are we?’

  Trying to make his voice posh. It just came out Wirral and Knowsley rather than Kirkby.

  ‘Killed herself,’ Merrily said. ‘Suze killed herself. That’s the difference.’

  ‘You think if the lad from EastEnders had been there, he’d’ve walked out uncut? Still, that’s neither here nor there, Merrily. They’re gonna say you filled her up with sinister, religious bullshit, and when you’d finished she was a domestic incident waiting to happen. They’ll say you’re at least half-responsible for this. You and your church. And I’m—’

  ‘My mate.’

  She felt bloated with the sickness of the situation.

  Up at the house of Susan Lulham, there were lights everywhere, like a party was going on, guests dribbling out.

  The house looked excited.

  7. Expert witness

  ‘It moved on,’ she said, almost shrilly. ‘The stakes rose.’

  ‘You didn’t need to know that.’ Huw Owen’s voice was like damp ash. ‘You didn’t need to know any of it. If you’d kept away, nowt would’ve changed. You didn’t save this poor bugger, you just dug yourself a pit.’

  ‘She phoned. She kept phoning. She—’

  ‘But was it a cry for help or a trap? Bait.’

  Gone midnight. A pool of light on the desk, that old briar scratching at the window. She hadn’t called Huw, he’d called her. A feeling he’d had that something was up.

  Further up than he could have imagined.

  ‘You might think,’ he said, ‘that we had precedent here, but there’s nowt that counts for shit. Back in the 1980s, feller in America thought his lad were possessed and then the demon gets into him and he kills this other feller. Judge throws out the defence on the basis that demonic possession can’t be proved.’

  ‘Which it can’t.’

  ‘You ever notice from your files how many US hauntings involve actual demonic entities from hell? They love their entities. As distinct from the remains of an American Citizen.’

  ‘No, I haven’t. And anyway, Susan Lulham…’

  ‘Not a demon.’

  ‘But a powerful presence. In life.’

  ‘This Zoe,’ Huw said. ‘How much did she know really about the Lulham woman?’

  ‘I thought not much. And she claimed to have had no interest in the paranormal, avoided all that stuff. Didn’t like old places. And yet, I learn tonight that she had a collection of spooky DVDs. Evidently hidden away when I was there. Real-life hauntings. Ghost-hunter stuff. She didn’t want me to know about that.’

  ‘Just a poor, innocent woman faced wi’ summat she can’t make sense of.’

  ‘And can’t go to her husband because he’s a committed atheist.’

  ‘You told the cops you were set up?’

  ‘It’s Frannie Bliss. He could work that out for himself.’

  She was thinking, now, of the one other time she’d nearly wound up in a murder trial - when Bliss’s immediate superior, Annie Howe, had put her through the wringer over an incident in the Frome Valley involving a man who’d killed his wife in not dissimilar circumstances. Wanting an exorcism. Merrily emphasising that all she’d left behind was prayer, but Howe had kept on calling it exorcism, going on to cite the notorious case of a Yorkshireman who, in the 1970s, had savagely murdered his wife after being exorcised by two Anglican priests. Over forty demons inside him, the priests had claimed.

  A whole legion. Dear God, don’t we get carried away? She listened to the old briar tapping the window. She kept applying secateurs, but the briar kept coming back.

  ‘Let’s get this right,’ Huw said. ‘This Zoe calls you in, claiming her house is haunted. No mention of possession.’

  ‘No. And she was quite aggressive.’ No way is that bitch driving me out.

  ‘Was her husband already dead, do you think, when she phoned you?’

  ‘I doubt she was inviting me to watch.’

  ‘See, the last time we talked, we looked at the idea of them being in it together, the Mahonies, thinking happen they could sue the vendors.’

  ‘I don’t think we got that right.’

  ‘She intended to kill her husband all along? All premeditated, and she wanted you a
s…’

  ‘Expert witness. I walked into it.’

  ‘How could you not? Given what you do, how could you tell her to bugger off?’

  ‘But a smart defence will try to take me apart and probably succeed. And you know where that goes next, in these oh-so-paranoid days. Gets to the point where some synod decides no act of deliverance should be carried out at all, on any level, without a psychiatrist present and a focus group outside the door. And that’s the beginning of the end of it, for all of us.’

  ‘Let’s not get apocalyptic, lass. How much time you got to play with?’

  ‘I think Bliss hopes to arrest her as soon as she’s out of hospital. Unless, of course, a psychiatrist thinks otherwise.’

  ‘And if she’s charged, it’s murder?’

  ‘I don’t know. What if he attacked her, and she grabbed the razor off him and… self defence? What if he killed himself with it and she—I don’t know. What I’m a bit scared of is what if they can’t keep her in custody or some psychiatric unit. Not enough places to put even dangerous people these days.’

  ‘Where would she go?’

  ‘That house…’

  Silence.

  ‘What?’ Huw said. ‘They’re not going to let her go back there, are they? They’ll have a shrink give her a going-over, and if they think she’s not safe to be in that house or anywhere near a razor, she’ll not even get bail.’

  ‘Right.’

  She kept telling herself that, later, as she lay in bed listening to the rain.

  8. Her

  The phone awoke her just before eight am. A green dawn in the leaded window.

  ‘How about off-the-record?’ Fred Potter was saying. ‘No attributed quotes. Can you do that?’

  She didn’t know. She’d managed three hours sleep, if sleep was the word for that patchwork-state. She pulled the phone onto the pillow.

  ‘Where’s Zoe?’

  ‘Discharged from hospital into police custody. Straightforward. Except it isn’t, is it?’

  ‘What do the police say?’

  ‘Absolutely nothing, as you’d expect. But in this case we don’t really need them, do we?’

  Fred Potter still sounded like a sixth-former, but he was a partner now in the Three Counties News Service, Cheltenham-based, the only surviving freelance news agency left in this general area. No daily newspapers or national broadcast outlets had staff this far outside Cardiff and Birmingham these days, so there was still money to be made from sending them stories. Used to hear from Fred quite often when she first got the night job, but now most papers were wary of the anomalous. Secular society thing.