‘Lewis, will you please tell that bi— your girlfriend to put it down?’
‘Could you put it down, Jane?’
Jane stood for a few moments trying to work out what was coming out here, when all she’d wanted to know was who’d told Fyneham this evil crap about Lol giving Mum the black eye.
‘Jane?’
She looked into Eirion’s worried eyes, and picked up what they were saying: If you drop that thing now, we’ve lost it…
… Whatever it is.
She carried the big computer across the room to the nearest table to the door and let it down slowly, keeping her hands on the base in case she had to snatch it up again. This was a relief, frankly, but it was Fyneham who nearly sobbed.
‘All right, let’s go right back to the beginning, JD,’ Eirion said.
Bliss said there were some small factories, not much more than workshops, on the edge of the Barnchurch industrial estate. Not the halfway respectable part, where the shops and warehouses were, but at the rough end, where it joined the Plascarreg.
Only one of these had ever been let. A light-engineering plant there had gone bust fairly soon, but a ‘small business syndicate’ on the Plascarreg had paid the tenants to pretend otherwise and sublet part of their unit for the preparation and distribution of crack cocaine and other commodities.
It was a relatively foolproof arrangement, and nobody had ever disturbed this enterprise until Robbie Walsh discovered that the site to the rear of the workshop was of archaeological importance, being a one-time place of execution.
Such was Robbie’s enthusiasm for first-hand knowledge of the past that he was disinclined to take ‘Piss off, son, and forget all this exists’ as a useful piece of advice. And so particular youngsters on the estate were encouraged to take an interest in Robbie and his leisure pursuits, to the extent of borrowing some of his books.
‘What did they do to him?’ Lol asked eventually, wanting to get this over with.
‘Each of the workshops has a storage shed at the rear,’ Bliss said. ‘Wood shed, traditional design with exposed cross-beam.’
Bliss stared into his glass of Gomer Parry’s cloudy homemade cider, the colour of rust and border clay. Threw down names that Lol had never heard before: Jason Mebus, Connor Boyd, Shane Nicklin.
‘The first time they hanged him,’ Bliss said, ‘they cut him down fairly quickly.’
39
Raw Madness
THE BACKSTAIRS WERE a dim half-spiral, coldly lit by one vertical slit too high to see through. Merrily was half-expecting the kitchen below to have a greasy spit and dead meat hanging from hooks, but it wasn’t like that.
‘Good morning again,’ the woman said.
The kitchen was warm and glazed with light tinted orange and emerald from illuminated glass in Gothic tracery around the tops of two long, thin windows. Pale ash units with olive-tiled work surfaces were built around a double-oven Aga. A rack of oak shelves displayed an apothecary’s collection of coloured jars and stoppered bottles.
‘Bell asked me to take care of you.’ The woman, who hadn’t yet introduced herself, had tufted brown hair, wore a white-and-grey-checked suit, no jewellery. ‘If not quite, I have to say, in those words.’
Coffee was percolating, and she was making wholemeal toast.
‘Have a seat, Mrs Watkins.’
Oh.
Merrily said nothing. A stone trough of red and orange tulips sent up a warm glow from below the twin windows, which opened up views across the fields to where the town rose in steep tiers to the church tower.
‘It’s rather late for breakfast,’ the woman said, ‘but I don’t suppose you particularly feel like lunch.’
‘Tea or coffee would be’ – Merrily had noticed that the tulips were in fact growing out of a stone coffin, its interior shaped for a body – ‘fine.’
Life directly out of death. Symbolism everywhere.
The woman wrinkled her nose, tapped the coffin with a shoe. ‘I’m still trying to persuade her to put that morbid artefact outside. Having already bribed the plumber to say there was no way it was going to work as a kitchen sink.’
No way she’d have it outside, either. Bell must have been cosying up to death since her teens.
‘She must be a… challenging person to accommodate,’ Merrily said.
‘Actually we accommodate each other fairly well. I call in most days, on the way to or from the office, or for lunch. Organize all the maintenance people and the services and the cleaner and the gardener and everyone else she’s far too vague to deal with. Do grab yourself a seat.’
There was a round table, with wooden chairs reflecting the design of seventeenth-century Glastonbury church chairs, with stubby X-legs. Merrily slid one out and sat down cautiously.
‘I think we spoke on the phone.’
‘Briefly.’ Susannah Pepper put the tray of coffee and toast in the centre of the table and sat down opposite her and smiled.
Ominous. A friendly, relaxed lawyer was rarely a good omen.
‘Where’s Bell?’
‘I don’t know.’ Susannah looked Merrily in the eyes. She was about thirty, and she seemed fit and confident and capable. Her skin was softly furry, like a peach’s. ‘I persuaded her to go out and let me handle things. She’s awfully disappointed in you. Feels betrayed.’
Silence. The sun had come out, setting fire to the orange glass in the tracery at the top of the windows, and the tulips in the stone coffin reached up like small goblets waiting to be filled.
‘All right,’ Merrily said at last. ‘I’m going to have to ask, aren’t I? How did you know who I was?’
Susannah stood up and went out of the room and came back with a leather briefcase, extracting a folded newspaper and tossing it on the table.
‘This morning’s edition.’
Merrily opened the paper and stared down, growing cold with dismay, at two pictures, one of the Hanging Tower, the other of herself, in colour, full face, under the headline:
EXORCIZE OUR CASTLE OF DEATH
Evil ghost must go, say townsfolk
She looked up. ‘This is crap.’
‘I think you should read it.’
She read it. It was overdramatized and dumbed-down. It was crass. It was full of conjecture. But at the centre of it…
The Mayor of Ludlow, George Lackland, confirmed last night that he had discussed the issue with Hereford exorcist, the Rev. Merrily Watkins.
‘It’s very much a matter for the Church,’ he said. ‘Whether you believe in ghosts or not, there’s no doubt in my mind that a religious service, or an exorcism, would make many people feel more at peace.
‘It’s been suggested that these tragic deaths have brought tourists into the town, but to my mind notoriety of this kind is no good for anyone in the long run.’
‘OK. It’s not crap. Not entirely.’
‘Thank you.’
‘It’s misleading, but it’s come from an actual petition sent to George Lackland. Someone obviously sent a copy to the press. But nobody’s spoken to me about it. I mean, one reason I’m here is to try and avoid anything drastic or…’
‘Laughable,’ Susannah said. ‘Holy water and incantations. Or am I misrepresenting your occupation?’
‘Don’t know where this picture came from, either,’ Merrily said. ‘Looks like an old one… couple of years old, anyway.’
She was outside Ledwardine church, and she was in the full kit. It looked like an official picture from the diocese. She didn’t remember it being taken.
And now Bell Pepper had evidently seen it. Bell, who disliked the clergy, had learned that she was not only a minister but a working exorcist, and she wasn’t called Mary. Everything was now entirely clear, and the situation couldn’t be worse.