OxCrimes

by Peter Florence

  It was not necessary for me to reveal to anybody what I had discovered. In the circumstances I felt that the past should be consigned to the past, for that, after all, is what forgiveness is all about.

  The college never paid my bill. I wrote to them about it, and received an acknowledgement of my letter, but they never settled the bill itself. I forgave them, of course, as one has to do. Forgiveness can be painful, but we have to practise it, and I decided that this was my opportunity to do so. I’m not sure that they realised that they had been forgiven, but then forgiveness is a private venture, and what matters is that it occurs. It makes us feel better, and I think in this case it did. Not that I’d let them try that again, of course. You have to remember at least some things.

  PHIL RICKMAN worked for nearly twenty years as a print, radio and TV journalist. Aware of the curious aspects of major news stories that didn’t get reported, he determined to put ‘mystery in the original sense’ into a crime series. His series of novels featuring Merrily Watkins, diocesan exorcist for Hereford, blend his love of crime fiction with a lifelong interest in folklore and the unexplained. He and his wife, Carol, live on the Welsh Border, where they find lots of both. He was born in Lancashire.

  The House of Susan Lulham

  Phil Rickman

  ‘I don’t like old,’ Zoe Mahonie said. ‘Get creeped out in churches. Sorry, but I do. Old places, you know what I mean? It’s why we come here.’

  ‘This city?’

  ‘This house,’ Zoe said.

  It wasn’t old, not in a way Zoe would see, and yet it was. Screened by the shaggy suburban conifers of Aylestone Hill, it was like an offcut from an arts centre from the 1960s: precast concrete, split-level, a jutting conservatory. Some architect’s strident statement, once alone, now with a small executive housing estate wrapped around it. Like a gag, Merrily thought as Zoe leaned into a puffy arm of the white leather sofa.

  ‘Couldn’t believe it was so cheap, see.’

  She was china-doll pretty, probably mid-thirties, not fat, just overweight. She wore a shiny, lime-green top and had short dark hair with highlights, and an emerald nose-stud.

  ‘Jonno,’ she said, ‘he had this surveyor guy give it a going-over, and he couldn’t find nothing wrong, so …’

  ‘The vendors didn’t say anything?’

  ‘Ah well …’ Zoe tossing out a bitter smirk. ‘Turns out they was in property, you know what I mean? Obviously picked it up dirt-cheap when nobody else wanted it, cos of what happened. And when we come to view, they’re both here, him and his girlfriend, so naturally we was thinking they lived here. Bastards.’

  ‘Who told you, in the end?’

  ‘Oh … Anita – neighbour. We been here a month by then. She thought we knew. As if.’ Zoe sat back. ‘Can you fix it?’

  She had one arm bared as if for an injection. Through the low, horizontal window, with its frame of reddish-wood, the October morning, under waxen cloud, was as white and ungiving as the room, where the only detail was in the white bookcase – half-filled with books on education, politics, psychology and, at the end, Dawkins’s The God Delusion, Hitchens’s God is Not Good and The Hole in the Sky by Matthew Stooke.

  Oh …

  Between the conifers, across the city, Merrily could see the Cathedral tower, a fat warning finger. She wanted time to think.

  On her first deliverance course, they’d been shown a DVD of a woman claiming there were bad things happening in her house. The priest, sceptical, suspecting domestic abuse – the husband – had left, wanting time to think. The woman had been found later with an empty pill bottle and a radio tuned to easy-listening.

  ‘Could you tell me about the mirror again?’ Merrily said. It was over by the door, vertical, in a chrome frame and bright with reflections of white walls, white squashy sofa, light grey carpet, white cordless phone on a small table near the sofa. And Merrily, in the unzipped black hoody over the well-worn cashmere sweater. No dog-collar, just the smallest pectoral cross. She thought her face looked pale and blurred.

  ‘Smeared all over, look.’ Zoe shuddered. ‘Hadn’t barely woken up, and Jonno’s away, like I said.’

  ‘So what exactly did you think –?’

  ‘Christ!’ Zoe sprang away from the sofa’s bloated arm. ‘Susan Lulham lived here. Susan Lulham. You know what I mean?’

  Only the basics. Sophie, at the Cathedral, was putting together some detailed background.

  ‘And it was definitely lipstick.’

  ‘It … yeah.’

  ‘And you scrubbed it away.’

  Zoe said nothing. A smartphone lay on the sofa, switched on to a display of coloured planets. If she’d taken pictures of the mirror with that, would they have shown only a reflection of the room?

  ‘Erm … was it your lipstick, Zoe?’

  Ready for the sharp look, and it came, small features crowding.

  ‘Didn’t expect you’d be going at it like the police or something.’

  Merrily smiled. The police had victims and offenders and sometimes a result. A police inquiry wasn’t a dance with invisible partners in a dark and possibly imaginary ballroom.

  ‘When …’ She wanted a cigarette, but it was unlikely anybody had smoked in here since the new carpet had gone down. ‘When you found out about Susan Lulham, what did your husband say?’

  ‘Said we finally had a reason why it was so cheap. He’s laughing. Nothing to worry about, kind of thing. Nothing, you know …’

  ‘Structural?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘But maybe … laughing because he didn’t believe anything that had happened here in the past could have any lingering effect? Except in the imagination.’

  There was a wedding picture on the bookcase. Jonno had thinning hair and a close beard. Zoe looked young and lovely.

  ‘Look, we was going through a bad patch before we come here. It was like a new start, you know what I mean? In a fantastic new house we couldn’t’ve afforded.’

  ‘So you haven’t told him,’ Merrily said. ‘About any of it.’

  ‘He’s busy all the time – head of department. Meetings, parent nights …’

  ‘It’s half term, isn’t it?’

  ‘He does courses. He’s on a course. In Bristol.’

  Zoe folded her arms. Behind her was the TV screen, big as they came. The one she’d said had come on at 3.00 am, throwing out jagged music from a slasher movie on some all-night horror channel.

  ‘Anyway,’ Zoe said, ‘I’d like it done before he comes back.’

  ‘And that’s …?’

  ‘Weekend.’

  Zoe moved to the window. The flower bed outside was full of evergreen ground-cover. Below it was the terrace where she’d said the woman had been standing as the sun was going down. Short leather jacket, red leggings. Solid as you like, until she wasn’t there.

  She. Her name had once been a lazy flourish of red, across a Hereford salon window. And, according to Zoe, across the mirror in lipstick the colour of fresh blood.

  Suze.

  ‘Seems she hated her given name,’ Sophie Hill said in the cathedral gatehouse office that afternoon. ‘Too neat and prissy, too old fashioned. If you called her Susan she’d just scowl and ignore you.’

  Merrily nodded. Jane had once had her hair done at Suze’s salon, now a charity shop. Well overpriced, in Merrily’s view, but Jane had been sixteen, and Suze was as near as you could find to Hereford cool. Suze had been going with this guy from EastEnders who she’d met when he’d presented her with a hairdressing award. Suze had broken up his marriage. Jane had been well impressed, but if she’d known that one of the teachers at her school had bought Suze’s house she’d never mentioned that.

  ‘Press cuttings.’

  Sophie placing a laminate folder on the desk in front of Merrily, who looked up, curious.

  ‘Where did you get these?’

  While diligently maintaining the deliverance database, Sophie trusted nothing you couldn’t keep in a firepro
of filing cabinet. She plugged in the kettle by the sink. ‘I’ll make some tea. Susan’s mother’s a secretary at one of the solicitors’ offices across the road. We were at school together.’

  ‘You never told me that.’

  ‘Why would I?’ Sophie took down mugs, reading glasses clinking against her pearls. ‘You don’t gossip, Merrily, when you work for …’

  Her lips tightened. Not the deliverance ministry. Not the Bishop, to whom she was lay-secretary. Sophie worked for the sandstone bookend to Hereford’s old city centre. The Cathedral.

  ‘Grace – Susan’s mother – keeps the cuttings in a file in her office. Well, you wouldn’t want them at home.’

  ‘No.’

  From the folder, Merrily shook photocopies of newspaper stories and a glossy county magazine which fell open at a double-page photo-spread.

  ‘Bloody hell, Sophie.’

  ‘Ah.’ The glasses were back on Sophie’s nose as she peered over Merrily’s shoulder. ‘She did men as well. Specialising, for a time, in artistically shaven heads.’

  In the picture, Susan Lulham held up a cut-throat razor, photoflash in the open blade. Behind it, Suze’s strong-boned face was blurred by lavish laughter below a wing of indigo hair. Underneath the magazine, Merrily found a photocopy, blackly overinked, of a front page of the Hereford Times.

  CITY STUNNED BY

  ‘BLOODBATH’ DEATH

  OF TOP STYLIST

  ‘Susan’s death, I’m afraid,’ Sophie said, ‘was like her private life. Entirely lacking in normal human restraint.’

  ‘You met her?’

  ‘Not since she was small. Long before she was excluded from school.’

  Merrily looked up.

  ‘Passing ecstasy tablets around in an exam room,’ Sophie said. ‘Don’t smile, Merrily, a child was hospitalised.’

  A blade of sunlight lit Sophie’s white hair, struck a spark from the kettle.

  ‘Never went back to school after that. When she showed an interest in hairdressing, her parents paid for a private course and set her up in business. Which, to their probable surprise, she took to quite rapidly. If not quite in the way they imagined. Four salons, eventually, from Ludlow to Ledbury.’

  ‘Must’ve done well to buy that house.’

  Sophie frowned.

  ‘Spectacularly unruly parties there.’ She picked up the folder. ‘Thought there was an inquest report, but it’s not here. I remember most of it, anyway, except the actor’s name. He’d apparently announced his intention of going back to his wife and children. Susan was furious. Two of her younger employees took her for a night out in Hereford to take her … out of herself.’

  ‘As they say.’

  ‘Put her in a taxi in the early hours. Arriving home, she phoned her estranged partner, starting what seems to have been something fairly volcanic – loud enough to awaken neighbours. Summer night, windows open. Nobody – well, hardly the first time they’d been disturbed by Susan’s antics, so nobody went out. Nobody heard her announcing to the former boyfriend that she’d begun cutting herself.’

  Merrily glanced at the magazine picture, with the razor. Sophie nodded.

  ‘Yes. Or one very like it. Drunken frenzy. The actor told the coroner he’d experienced her tirades before and didn’t believe her. After a while, he hung up on her. Perhaps she thought he was leaping into his car to come and save her from herself, but he went back to sleep. She kept on cutting.’

  Merrily winced. Suze grinned from the pages, the wide lips pulled back over the too-even white teeth and meaty gums. Merrily shut the magazine. Sophie poured water into the pot, steam rising around her.

  ‘How reliable is this woman?’

  ‘Zoe Mahonie? She’s … I don’t know. You never can know, can you? Her husband’s an atheist, presumably with all the layers of disbelief that go with that. An educated man, and she …’

  ‘Not a teacher?’

  ‘Part-time dinner lady at his last school.’ Merrily sighed. ‘What I should be doing now is finding previous tenants. The guy who bought the house was smart enough to use it as rental accommodation for a couple of years, let the history fade.’

  ‘The former tenants could be anywhere, now. And so you find them and they say it was a perfectly peaceful home, what then? How did you leave it?’

  She told Sophie about the first-stage blessing. Cupboards opened, mirror covered, TV unplugged, sprinkling of holy water, prayers. Sanctify this house, that in it there may be joy and gladness …

  Covering her back. What you did. Knowing you might still wind up looking stupid or naïve, part of something obsolete.

  Who told you about me, Zoe, you mind me asking?

  Just a friend. Reluctantly. She posted your number on Facebook.

  A diocesan deliverance consultant was rarely contacted directly. Mostly you offered technical advice to priests approached by parishioners disturbed by what they believed were paranormal phenomena – the third reason for remembering the clergy, after weddings and funerals. The one rarely spoken of in a secular society.

  Except, it seemed, on Facebook.

  Merrily shook her head.

  ‘She kept saying, You have to exorcise me. They all know that word. I’m trying to explain that exorcism applies only to something considered malevolent and essentially non-human. She said, What do you think fucking Suze is?’

  This had been outside, in a warm, desultory rain, both of them standing on the steps where Zoe had said the woman in the leather jacket had been visible. Merrily murmuring about peace and love, health and goodness, Zoe looking contemptuous. This was it? A bit of a blessing? Pat on the head?

  ‘I didn’t tell her a major exorcism needed permission from the Bishop, and a visit from a psychiatrist. How would you even approach that? Zoe, if you don’t mind, I’d like someone else to meet you …’

  Merrily shuddered. None of the cases she’d handled had ever got that far.

  ‘Might she be deluded?’ Sophie said.

  ‘Don’t know. You can never be sure. I told her if the problems continued, we could raise our game all the way to a Requiem Eucharist. But that would need more people, preferably including someone who’d known Susan Lulham personally.’

  ‘The Requiem would be for Susan?’

  ‘She didn’t seem to get that at all. It was like she expected the garlic and the crucifix. I asked if there was someone she could stay with until her husband came home. She said she had a sister but they didn’t get on.’

  Sophie placed a mug of tea in front of Merrily.

  ‘I don’t think you’re entirely convinced by Mrs Mahonie are you?’

  ‘Oh God, she’s standing there in the rain, under an umbrella like she’s waiting for a bus. She doesn’t do churches or any old places. And she got my number from a woman on Facebook. And you know what was missing, Sophie? Fear. When it’s there, you can smell it, slightly sour, like … fresh sweat.’

  ‘You didn’t like her,’ Sophie said.

  ‘Not a very Christian reaction, is it? Another reason I can’t let it go.’

  Aftercare.

  She phoned Zoe’s house six times that night. Answer-phone. A man’s voice delivering the message in a clipped, impatient way. Maybe Zoe had gone to her sister’s after all. Twice Merrily left messages, waiting in the scullery she used as an office, watching her own face, grey, in the screensaver.

  Forty next year, a daughter out there in the adult world. How long could she keep this up? How to deal with change: a TV turning itself on in the night, spirit messages in the hard disk, phantoms on Facebook, firewalls breached by the demonic.

  A level of scepticism was essential, but how far should it rise before you felt obliged to throw on all the lights and walk away?

  She phoned Jane’s mobile. Voice mail. There was rarely a signal around the Pembrokeshire dig where Jane was doing her gap year as a gopher for archaeologists. She left a message.

  ‘No pressure, flower. I just wondered if you remembered a physics teache
r at Moorfield called Jonathan Mahonie.’

  The absent Jonno was important. Coming between a wife and a husband was never good, but an atheist husband … that was asking for trouble.

  She Googled Susan Lulham, found another of Suze’s claims to fame. The year before her death, she’d done a daytime TV slot, discussing new hairstyles and how to achieve them in your own bathroom. No YouTube sequences from that, just the razor picture of Suze with blurred eyes, lavish, white smile exposing gums the colours of offal. On full-screen you could read the brand name on the razor: Bismarck. The only other pictures were from a magazine feature which had not been in Sophie’s portfolio: Suze showing off her new home, the living room looking much as it had this morning, same pale colours, even a mirror in the same position. A shot of the house from outside had been taken from a low angle in bright sunlight, and its walls looked hard, like bone. Savagely modern when it had been built, decades earlier, but now somehow just very Suze.

  Ethel padded in and curled into her basket. Merrily closed her eyes to the sound of soft purring and the climbing rose tapping the window in the night breeze. She thought about the concept of the unquiet spirit, restless essence of someone who’d died not peacefully.

  Zoe didn’t call back. Nor did Jane till the following day.

  After Midweek Mass, this was. She’d been doing the Wednesday Eucharist for a while now, never really liking the word Eucharist but worried about simplifying it in case anyone thought she’d picked up the Catholic virus. But as Anglo-Catholic priests tended still to disapprove of female clerics, how likely was that, anyway?

  ‘Mahonie?’ Jane said. ‘He’s not moved into the village, has he?’

  ‘He lives in Hereford. I ran into his wife, that’s all.’

  ‘Poor cow.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘He only arrived a few weeks before I left, so I rang Rhiannon for you. Rhiannon Hughes? Who’s still serving time at Moorfield, so please don’t stitch her up. Bottom line, Mahonie’s a slimeball. Leans over you to make a point on your laptop, and his hands … you know?’