‘Oh, he’d… had a little too much wine.’
‘Something about not trusting the dead.’
‘He was talking about the gypsy dead. Romany ghosts. What he called the mulo. He said gypsies were terrified of their own ghosts, though they didn’t give a toss about ours. It didn’t seem entirely logical to me. But what do I know?’
‘He say anything about there being a presence in the kiln?’
‘Only in passing.’ She stepped onto the footpath on the other side of the bridge. ‘But it doesn’t matter now, does it? Nothing to explain to the Crown court. Just an inquest.’
Lol followed her. ‘And yourself. If you can’t somehow explain it to yourself, you’ll never trust Deliverance again, will you?’
‘Well, sure, I’d rather have got myself shredded in the witness box, have the whole exorcism thing held up as some kind of tawdry medieval spoof, than lose another life.’ She waited for him by the first of the poplars, the moonlight on her face, shadows under her eyes. ‘Or maybe I’m fooling myself? Maybe I’m secretly glad he’s dead, because he’d already set me up and he was probably going to do it again.’
‘You don’t have it in you to be glad anyone’s dead,’ he said.
‘As a vicar.’
‘Not even – let’s be honest here – as a person.’
‘Oh, well, you – you kind of stop being a person when you join the Church,’ Merrily said. ‘You have to learn to suffocate your feelings.’
It went so quiet you could even hear the Frome moving below.
‘Ah,’ Lol said.
‘Redefine your goals. That kind of thing.’
‘Damn,’ Lol said.
‘Nice tune,’ Merrily said.
They both stood with their backs to the door, so there was no way out, short of physical violence. And although they were both seriously into middle age, they were big people. She was kind of pudgy-armed and hefty and he was tall and thin and, although he didn’t look too well, he did look desperate enough to damage somebody.
Like, for instance, somebody who might know where his daughter was but was refusing to tell him.
‘Honest to God,’ Jane said, scared, ‘we didn’t even know she was missing. We came here to see her.’
Invoking God because it looked like this might well cut some ice here. The room was too bright from a big white ceiling bowl loaded with high-wattage bulbs. There was a wooden crucifix on the mantelpiece over the Calor gas fire and round the walls these really awful religious paintings by one of those pedantic Pre-Raphaelite guys who thought it was important to paint every blade of grass individually.
‘I wouldn’t lie,’ Jane insisted. ‘My mum’s a vicar. I wasn’t brought up to lie, OK?’
‘Your mother knows you’re here, then?’ said Mr Shelbone. He had a weak voice that sounded kind of laminated, and Jane felt slightly sorry for him; it was clear his wife called the shots.
‘Of course she doesn’t,’ Mrs Shelbone snapped. ‘Her mother seems to know very little of what goes on.’
Jane let the slur go past. ‘No, she doesn’t. But only because I feel responsible for dropping her in it when I didn’t tell her at the time because I didn’t think there was anything particular to worry about, but now I know I was wrong, and I want to put it right.’ She drew a long breath.
‘Why should we believe you?’ Mrs Shelbone demanded. ‘How do we know you’re not just sensation-seeking?’
‘This is silly. Jane’s only trying to help.’ Eirion’s Welsh accent coming through. ‘That’s all she wants – and to find out what’s going on.’
‘And what,’ said Mr Shelbone, ‘is going on, in your opinion?’
Jane swallowed. It was one thing telling Amy what kind of psychotic slag Layla Riddock was; it was something else laying it on her parents in her absence. Serious as this whole thing could turn out to be, it broke some kind of code of honour. You didn’t grass until you reached the stage where it was impossible to deal with it yourself.
This didn’t seem to worry Eirion, however. Maybe he’d just had it with the whole thing. Or maybe he thought this was the stage.
‘It comes down to bullying, Mr Shelbone. Your daughter’s been picked on by an older girl, who evidently thinks she’s… something special.’
‘Picked on?’
‘Ensnared. You must know what I’m talking about. Especially as it’s been suggested to us today that she – this girl – might have wanted to use Amy to get at—well, to get at you.’
Mr Shelbone was silent. Once Eirion mentioned the Christmas Fair, Layla Riddock would be in the frame. Best to leave it here, Jane decided. They should say as little as possible, get out and go and grovel to Mum, let her decide what to do.
‘Sit down.’ Mr Shelbone indicated a sofa in a pine frame, like the bottom half of a bunk.
Jane said, ‘We have to be…’
Eirion just shrugged and went over to the sofa and sat down.
‘Now then, son,’ said Mr Shelbone. ‘Let’s start at the beginning.’
‘Well, her name’s Layla Riddock,’ Eirion said.
36
Confluence
LOL TENSED. There was the tower across the fields, just as he’d seen it the first time, the tip of its witch’s hat askew, as if a low-flying aircraft had clipped it. He remembered how he’d thought it looked like a fairy castle, with that glow in the window.
Where a glow was now.
‘What?’ Merrily demanded.
‘There’s—’ He sagged, his back to a tree trunk, the breath forced out of him as if he’d been punched. ‘Sorry, it’s just the moon. It’s just a reflection of the moon.’ It seemed to be everywhere tonight.
‘What did you think it was?’
‘How about we go back?’ He searched for the path, then spotted where he’d gone wrong the last time: there was a stile he could have climbed over to follow a circular route back to the bridge, and another path that led into the tangled wood. ‘Merrily?’
‘Erm… Lol, how do I get to the old hop-yard? Where you saw Stephanie that night?’
‘Oh no.’ Lol stood in the middle of the path, ‘I really don’t think so.’
‘Lol…’
‘Merrily – tell me. That’s why we’re here?’
‘Look,’ she said, ‘I haven’t got the gear, I haven’t got the holy water, I haven’t got the sacrament. But I can pray. I can do the words.’
‘Words?’
‘Words to get them out of here.’
‘Who?’
‘Stock, Stephanie… Call it precautionary. Call it—’
‘To stop them becoming earthbound, right? To fix it so nobody in the future goes for an innocent walk in that field and’ – Lol actually shivered – ‘sees something.’
‘All right, to try and fix it. You’ve got to try, haven’t you? It’s what I do. Like I keep telling people. I’m actually trying very hard to believe it’s what I’ve been put here to do.’
‘Cure of souls,’ Lol said. He sensed how close she was to tears.
‘Yes.’
‘Souls of the living or the souls of the dead?’
‘Don’t you know?’
‘Merrily, it’s just a phrase I heard with the right balance, the right metre. If it sounds right, use it. What does it mean?’
‘It’s,’ she shook her head at him, ‘just an old description of what we do – what we’re supposed to do. Implies we have curative powers, which I suppose we don’t, most of us. We just know how to ask nicely. And all I want to do now is say, Please God, will you accept the souls of these two people, help them break the bonds of obsession, anger, lust, hatred – help them leave it all behind. Is that so bad?’