by Phil Rickman
Beth Pollen sighed. ‘Because if Stanner had become, as Mr Foley had planned, a regular conference venue for The Baker Street League, the White Company would never have been allowed to set foot in the building. What I didn’t lie about was the enmity between the two organizations, which, as a member of both, I’ve been able to observe, over the years, in all its incredible peevishness. I realize the League is far more prestigious, prosperous and influential, and I’m sorry, but I wanted us in here. I wanted Alistair Hardy here. He has a remarkable ability.’
‘We don’t understand,’ Jane said.
Mrs Pollen sighed, her face coloured mauve by the halogen lights. ‘We had to mislead the White Company as well. Doubt I’d have been able to persuade them if I hadn’t been able to show there was evidence that Conan Doyle had been here at the critical moment. Alistair Hardy’s fees are… sizeable. He’s doing this for nothing because of the TV coverage.’
Jane felt herself exploding. ‘Get me out of here! Everybody who sets foot in this place just lies.’
Amber said, ‘Mrs Pollen, you said “we”?’
‘Yes,’ Beth Pollen said. ‘The other person.’
The other person. The phrase seemed to bounce off the stones in the wall.
Natalie. It all added up, didn’t it? When Ben had lost The Baker Street League conference, it was Nat who came up with an instant replacement and rescued the whole situation. OK, just a bunch of loony spiritualists, but better than nothing. The way Beth Pollen had turned up at the church, at just the right moment to impress Antony Largo. A set-up.
‘I was going to get round to that,’ Mrs Pollen said.
‘Brigid?’ Jane said.
‘So you do know,’ Mrs Pollen said.
Dexter had taken off his expensive biker’s jacket, uncovering a grey denim shirt with epaulettes and a badge on the breast pocket with twin exhaust pipes on it. He stood in the middle of the floor, his hands half-curled, like ring-spanners.
‘So you en’t took nothin’.’
It was likely he’d recognized Lol now as the guy he’d seen through the scullery window. But he wouldn’t know whether Lol had seen him, so he wasn’t letting on. Hence the catching-a-burglar routine.
It gave Lol some leeway. He told Dexter his story about the vicar getting worried when Alice had twice failed to answer the phone. Lol walking over here to see if everything was all right, finding all the lights on in the empty bungalow, with the back door unlocked. No more than the truth.
‘Sorry I came in like this, but anything could’ve happened.’
‘Like what?’ Dexter said.
‘I mean… where is she?’
‘How should I know? I come back from closin’ up the chip shop, hour or so ago, she en’t yere. Telly on and everything, no Alice. I been out lookin’ for her. No sign. Dunno where she gone. Neighbour’s, mabbe.’
‘They all seem to be in bed.’
Dexter shrugged.
‘You called the police?’
‘Not yet. Her’d go through the bloody roof. ’Sides which, how’s the police gonner get through with all the bloody roads blocked for miles around? Nah, her’s likely wandered off. Her’ll be back.’
Lol considered. He’d been honest so far, no call to deviate from that.
‘She’s had a shock. The vicar told me.’
Discovering that he was playing the Christian aide, the clergy groupie, the little guy in glasses who fluttered vaguely around the vicarage, a moth lured by the incandescence of its incumbent.
‘Tole you what?’
‘About your cousin.’
‘Yeah. Tough.’
‘You weren’t that close?’
Dexter shook his head. ‘Waste of fuckin’ space, you want the truth. Never kept a job, always in trouble with the law. Brought the whole family into disrepute.’ He leaned towards Lol, a bubble of moisture like an ornamental stud in the cleft of his lower lip. ‘So what’s with you and the vicar?’
‘Friends. I’m staying the weekend with her. She was called out to talk to someone who attempted suicide.’
‘Local?’
‘Kington.’
‘En’t gonner get back from there in a hurry.’
‘So I’ve got to ring her back about Alice. She’s worried.’
Dexter stared at him blankly, like, What do you want me to do about it? He went to the chrome-fronted fridge/freezer. ‘You wanner lager?’
‘No, it’s… Yeah, OK. Thanks.’
Dexter got out two cans of Stella Artois, tossed one to Lol. ‘Wanner help me take a look around, is it?’
‘That’s a good idea.’
‘Right, then.’ Dexter put on a grim, knowing smile, snapping the ring-pull on his beer can. A smugness there, Lol thought, a satisfaction.
‘Which way do you think she might’ve gone?’
‘Put it this way, if you gets to Leominster, turn back.’ Dexter had a swig of lager, took his leather jacket from the back of a chair, pulling a pair of black driving gloves out of one of the pockets. ‘Never mind, boy, be a cold bed for you tonight, anyway, look.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Don’t gimme that “friends” shite.’
Dexter clapped Lol on the back. It was as if he was on a roll and nothing could go wrong for him tonight.
Yes, Jane had heard of her. Although of course it had all happened long before she was born. She knew about her in the way she knew of, say Lizzie Borden, a half-mythical figure with a rhythmical, nursery-rhyme name and an underlying pulse of horror.
Brigid Parsons killed some boys.
There were others. There was Mary Bell, whose name you knew because it was such a nice, short, wholesome name, and the killers of little Jamie Bulger, whose names you could never remember.
But this was less horrific, surely, because only one of the boys died. And he was older than Brigid Parsons, so the element of cruelty was missing, or, if it was there, it was different. Different with Brigid Parsons.
Different with Natalie Craven.
You’re asking me what I believe? I believe you don’t let anybody fuck you about. That’s it, really.
This was unreal, and it wasn’t less horrific at all. Jane had an idea of how bad it actually was; she’d once read a colour-supplement feature: Where Is Brigid Parsons? Something like that.
Brigid Parsons could never call herself that again, in the same way that Mary Bell had had to lose her fresh, clean name — although apparently she was a nice woman now, not the same person as the child who’d killed two little boys and given herself away by asking to see them in their coffins.
Who were you kidding? In some ways, Brigid was worse. For cruelty, substitute plain savagery. The magazine had revealed details that could not be published in the papers at the time, as those were days when family papers didn’t go into details about…
… Mutilation.
Jane sat on her stool, looking down at her fingers, empurpled in the lights, then up at Beth Pollen, who had revealed the unbelievable. And then at Amber, who hadn’t been able to speak for whole minutes, it seemed like, and when she did it was just to say faintly, ‘Does Ben know?’
Jane looked back down at her fingers. The thing was that Natalie was just so… cool.
Amber stood up and went and did a very Amber thing — she stirred the chocolate, although it was probably ruined by now.
Then she came and sat on the stool with her hands in her lap.
‘Does Ben know?’
‘I wouldn’t think so,’ Beth Pollen said. ‘Though I suppose everyone will know in a short while, when they either find her or the media find out they’re looking.’
Jane looked up at the high window, almost obscured now by layers of snow that, from down here, looked grey, like concrete. Christ, she thought, Christ.
This explained everything about Clancy: why she was so quiet, the tall, gawky kid behind the pile of books, why she’d been to so many different schools.
Why she’d leapt up from her homework in horror when Nat had walked
down these steps with blood all over her arms.
The great revelation over, Beth Pollen talked about her and Natalie.
In the drab aftermath of his death, Beth had taken up her husband’s final research project, the previously unchronicled history of a great Victorian house on the very border of Wales and England. She’d thought it might make a small book, locally published, with his name on its cover, a fitting memorial. Sometimes she could sense him at her elbow as she typed, suggesting a better word, rebuking her for attempting to include some picturesque but uncorroborated anecdote.
Although the text would be tinted by her growing interest in spiritualism, the very sense of Stephen had made Beth more assiduous in her research. And that was how she’d met Natalie Craven, who also was awfully interested in the history of Stanner Hall.
‘I suppose I needed a friend. No, that’s wrong… I suppose I needed a different sort of friend. She could almost have been my daughter, but that’s not how it was, either. She had this mature awareness of how things worked — how one might turn situations around — I suppose it was years of surviving in the prison system that made her like that, but of course I didn’t know that at the time. She simply fired me, gave me back my energy.’
‘She can make things happen,’ Jane said. ‘I think it’s because she doesn’t care whether they happen or not.’
‘And I was intrigued by her relationship with Jeremy Berrows. Absolutely nothing about him — or so you thought at first. Only slowly becoming aware of a kind of native spirituality — the kind that you expect to find in farmers whose families have lived close to the land for centuries, but seldom do these days. Oh, I was very curious about Jeremy and how those two came to be together.’
‘Especially after all those years apart,’ Jane said.
‘Well, the first ten she could do nothing about. And then, when you realize, approaching middle age, that perhaps you’ve never been able to connect with anybody as fully as the farm boy you met when you were twelve — that maybe you really were two halves of something — what do you do about it? Nothing. You don’t really believe the validity of a memory that old, do you? It’s like a myth.’
Two halves… Jane thought about Jeremy Berrows walking into his barn with a rope. She said nothing.
Beth Pollen said, ‘We discussed it, after she’d revealed her real… her former identity.’ She glanced at Jane. ‘And if you’re wondering how that came about, it was when we were researching Hattie, copying old photographs, and there was one of her as a girl, with her family, and I said, unthinking, “Oh, she looks rather like Clancy.” Could have bitten my tongue off when I saw Natalie’s face, but that’s how it came out.’
‘I think I’ve seen that picture. It’s in her room now — Hattie’s room.’
‘So the next day we were due to go to Kington Church together. She didn’t turn up. But the following day, early in the morning, there she was, awfully pensive. And just told me, quite simply, who she was and what she’d done. No attempt to justify or explain it, and she didn’t swear me to secrecy — I hope she knew she didn’t have to. I certainly haven’t said a word to anyone… until now.’
‘Didn’t knowing about that, you know, alter things?’
‘Threaten the friendship? Why should it? In some ways, it deepened it, because I felt this overwhelming need to understand her. I felt that no one, except perhaps Jeremy, ever had. And I felt that Stephen had brought her to me.’
‘But she was a murderer,’ Amber said.
‘And she’d been punished for it.’
‘And she was… that woman’s granddaughter.’
‘I’d be jolly stupid if I said that didn’t frighten me. I remember that when I recognized the awful parallel between Hattie and the blood-weary Robert, and Natalie and Jeremy, I was so scared for Jeremy. But in the end I realized that this, in some strange way, had only intensified the relationship. They were living on the edge of a chasm. I think, when she met him again, with the knowledge of what had gone before, she knew that if she didn’t take that risk — seize it — then she’d just be… giving in to the past. And that’s not how she is.’
Jane said. ‘Let’s get this out. You think that whatever made Hattie Chancery do what she did was also present in Brigid Parsons?’
‘It’s what she needs to know, and it’s why she came back. She realizes there’s a negative energy inside her that she can’t always control. Her mother…’ Beth Pollen took a breath. ‘Natalie doesn’t think, doesn’t want to think it’s a mental illness.’
‘You and she think there’s a… psychic connection with Hattie?’
‘This is why I wanted Alistair here. People like you might demean spiritualism, but I think there is something to be discovered here, and it’s nothing that we’re going to find written down.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Jane said, ‘I can’t believe an intelligent woman like you really thinks that someone like Hardy can deal with something this… enormous. I mean, he… He’s a phoney.’
Jane heard men’s voices and footsteps at the top of the stone stairs. Two men were coming down the steps. Jane was expecting cops, or maybe Hardy and Matthews. She really didn’t care if Hardy had heard her talking about him.
‘He isn’t a phoney, believe me,’ Beth Pollen said. ‘But I didn’t say that I thought he could deal with it. A medium is simply what the word says. It’s about communication, rather than solutions.’
Amber turned to Jane. ‘I think she means that’s something for your mother.’
‘Oh.’
It was Ben Foley who sprang from the bottom step. ‘Amber, I’m sorry if I’m interrupting anything, but we’ll need another room.’
The man with Ben bestowed on Jane a gracious smile.
‘Jesus, I wouldnae like to do that journey again. Thank you, hen, you’ve got a hell of a nose for a developing situation.’
Nothing was ever simple, nothing ever painless.
Danny had been aware of diamond-bright blue-white vehicle lights behind them on the bypass, sticking with them after they turned off at Walton, using their tracks. But with snow fuzzed all over his wing mirror he couldn’t be sure what it was, and by the time they pulled up at his place the lights had vanished.
It was when Jeremy got down to open the farm gate for him that the little black Daihatsu appeared, coming the other way, down from Kinnerton. Danny had the idea it had been waiting in the lay-by, about a hundred yards back, to see who was in the tractor. Now it stopped, hugging the hedge, wedges of snow collapsing onto its roof as someone got out, a woman in a blue waterproof. Then Jeremy was springing back from the gates, and he was locked together with the woman in the tractor’s headlight beams.
And Danny was down from the cab, real fast, and in through the farm gate.
Greta had the door open before he reached it, standing there in a wash of yellow, and just for a moment it was like the first time he’d ever seen her, in a long floaty frock with little golden stars, like a dusty sunbeam.
‘You all right?’ Danny almost sobbing in relief.
Gret said, ‘I couldn’t do nothing, Danny. Had to let them in. Wasn’t nothing I could—’
‘What?’ And then Danny heard another engine up on the road and turned and saw the blue-white lights hard behind the tractor at the gate, heard the jolt of vehicle doors opening.
‘When they told me,’ Greta said, ‘about Sebbie Dacre…’
And then behind her, inside the house, a girl’s voice was screaming out, in real distress, ‘No! Mum, go away! Don’t come in!’ And there were sounds of pulling and scuffling, and this long, rending wail of despair.
Greta said, ‘You better—’
A copper came past her then, out of the front door, and Danny recognized his grey moustache: Cliff Morgan, sergeant.
‘Don’t get involved, Danny, eh?’ Cliff said.
But Danny ran back with the coppers to the open gate, where meshing headlights had turned the snow magnolia, and Jeremy and Natalie Craven were boxe
d in between the tractor and Jeremy’s old black Daihatsu, in the centre of all these beams of hard light, snow coming down on them, cops gathering in a wider circle, blocking the lane.
But they were separated from it. World of their own. Jeremy with his scarf wound around his neck, so she wouldn’t see what he’d done to hisself, holding her hand real tight. ‘Where you been?’ he kept saying. ‘Where you been?’
Natalie Craven pulled his head into the crease of her shoulder.
‘It’s all over,’ Natalie said, long hands in his fluffy hair. ‘All done now.’
42
Alleluia
He didn’t expect them to find her. That was clear. Dexter wasn’t subtle, and he didn’t expect them to find Alice.
They went up to the top of Old Barn Lane, back into Church Street and down to the Ox with its frosted front windows, a dim yellow glow visible from somewhere back in the pub.
‘They used to drink yere, when Jim was alive,’ Dexter said, as if they might see Alice peering in, thinking it was still 1979.
Dexter was going through the motions.
Lol wiped snow from his glasses with a forefinger. ‘How did she find out about your cousin?’
‘Eh?’
‘You said you thought it was the shock that might’ve made her wander off.’
‘I said that?’ Dexter sniffed and slumped off round the corner, where an alley led to public lavatories. Lol followed him. A tin-hatted lamp on a wrought-iron bracket turned snowflakes into falling sparks.
‘Check out the Women’s, you reckon?’ Dexter said.
‘It’s all locked up.’ Lol could see an iron gate, a chunky padlock.
‘Pity.’ Dexter finished off his lager, tossed the can to the end of the alley. He came over, leaned down into Lol’s face, his arms folded. ‘You really poking that little vicar?’
‘Not right now,’ Lol said.
‘Her go like Alleluia! when her comes?’ Dexter burst out laughing. ‘Just thought o’ that.’
‘Must remember to tell her,’ Lol said.
‘Alleluia when her comes.’ Dexter laughed up at the sky.
‘What do you reckon happened to him?’ Lol followed Dexter round to the front of the pub, where they stood under its open porch. ‘Just seems odd, a bloke falling in the road.’