Authors: Phil Rickman
64
Physical things
B
ETTY HAD HER
Alice band back in. Her face shone, scrubbed, cold water darkening the neck of her dress.
Merrily lowered the bag to the dust. The bag with the salt and water and the Bible. Her head was full of liturgy she was unlikely to be using. She felt tension pouring out of her, like sweat after flu.
‘You said you’d felt evil here, and you were right. We saw it. We saw it happening.’
In this drab building devoted to violent death. From animal slaughter to the savage ritual killing of a part-time prostitute.
Thirty years ago. There weren’t prostitutes any more, they were sex workers. The parameters of civilized society were being expanded daily so that no one should feel marginalized any more. No right, no wrong. No black, no white. No good, no evil. And incest was simply a preference.
‘You said you called them out,’ Merrily said. ‘What’s that mean, Betty?’
‘It was after we saw the video,’ Betty said, ‘I realized that whatever was here left physical things. A swastika in the chimney, a secret hole in the wall.’
‘Mmm.’
‘Robin had a bad night here, but he was drunk and he slept in the bath which, if wasn’t the same bath, was certainly in the same place where Cherry Banks’s body was butchered. He had bad dreams. Who wouldn’t? Now I know what happened, I’m
inclined to think we’re getting something from the victim rather than the aggressor.’
‘To which there’s an answer, which doesn’t involve exorcism,’ Merrily said.
‘What did you do here when you came up earlier?’
‘Just a preliminary. A sprinkling of holy water. I’d felt, I dunno, something smothering. I’m not psychic. Just felt blocked.’
‘I felt angry. You probably saw that. While you were down at Jeeter’s I came up here and I’m standing in the middle of the room, where you are now, staring at the blocked-up hole in the fireplace, thinking,
How do you want to play this, Jerry? Come on out, you sordid little creep.
The sort of thing Robin says. Then I realized I was shouting it.’
‘Nothing?’
‘So I did de Braose next. I’m going,
Look at me, de Braose, you grasping, power-hungry, proto-Nazi scumbag. Look at me. I’m a blonde from the north, my ancestors were probably Vikings. Some of them, anyway.
I’m conjuring an image of him in his chain mail and his surcoat – only I put a swastika on it as his emblem.’
‘What do you mean, you
put
it on…?’
‘Used to do this sort of thing a lot at one time. Before I grew up. Scared the crap out of myself. Not this time. He faded almost immediately. If there’d been anything of him here with any kind of balls it would’ve clung on. The image would either have reformed or intensified.’
‘Betty, call me an old hen, but that seems like playing chicken on the motorway.’
‘Yeah, well, I’ve done a few things I regret. Bit of candle magic to sell the house. You charge a green candle – with your door key inside – and put it in the window of the house you’re trying to sell, and by the time it’s burned down… Well, we had an offer that surprised even the estate agent. Some people who’d been to view but hadn’t seemed that enthusiastic. Coincidence, or had I imposed my will on them? I don’t know, and it didn’t make me happy. Would there be a cruel twist because what I’d done was
wrong? But my poor, crippled husband felt it was his destiny to live here, and him from Brooklyn.’
Merrily took out her cigarettes.
‘This OK?’
‘Sure.’
Betty dragged out two of the cane chairs and they sat down, their backs to the fireplace. The micro-flame from the Zippo seemed very bright. Nothing blew it out. Betty was right. Nothing much here. Only spent terror.
‘So what I was thinking,’ Merrily said, ‘was a Requiem Eucharist for Cherry Banks. A funeral mass. You and Robin and anyone who might have known her or this place. I think that might do a lot for the atmosphere. If that doesn’t offend your—’
‘Oh, Christ, no, that would be good.’
Funny how pagans, even atheists, leaned on Christian expletives in times of stress.
‘The evil, of course, is still around,’ Merrily said. ‘But probably not here.’
‘Bringing the tape out of the wall… I’m thinking that might reduce the weight.’
‘Actually, I’m wondering now if Jerry Brace put that tape in the wall not for any ritual reason. Suppose he wanted it to be fairly accessible. To prove something, if necessary.’
‘Like what?’
‘Not sure. But maybe he was thinking that, when he was a long way from here, he could get word to somebody where it could be found. Dunno. Junkie logic. He never had the chance, anyway.’
Betty cradled her hands on her lap.
‘Don’t go thinking I’m any less scared. People are frightened of ghosts, who seldom harm anybody – just things you saw as a kid but didn’t have to bother with, adults you didn’t have to be polite to, children you couldn’t play with. But… we live in a human world, with human evil, and human evil is… nearly always much worse.’
‘Did you hear Tamsin Winterson’s been found? Murdered.’
‘Oh Christ. Where?’
‘Cusop.’
Betty sighed.
‘They gave Robin a hard time. We only found the tape because they took the place apart. It’s like we were brought here to be some kind of bloody catalyst. What’s happened to her?’
‘Confidentially – pretty much what happened to Cherry Banks, that’s the thing. Gwyn Jones is making connections.’
‘Small town. Unusual if things this horrible aren’t linked. This is awful, Merrily. You feel you’re watching something… forming… out of the past. And we’ve been made part of it. This guy photographed me in front of the castle. Said it was for a tourist brochure. I didn’t believe him somehow. It was like… I don’t know. Like being fitted into something.’
‘Robin said you heard the laugh.’
‘I’m no judge.’ Betty stared at the black window. ‘I don’t know the woman.’
‘What’s that?’
A whistling outside. Might have been a hymn tune, though not one that Merrily knew. Betty found a tired smile.
‘Mrs Villiers. Someone else who seems trapped. In a private world. With ghosts. Maybe it’s catching. Just before the guy with the camera, our landlord’s wife was telling me she’d seen Dame Beryl Bainbridge, the novelist. On the day she died. In London, I suppose.’
Merrily looked up, startled.
‘Where was this?’
‘On the square, I think. The marketplace. Near where I was photographed. Does that mean something?’
‘I don’t know.’
Merrily was at the window. Just when you thought that rationality, however grim and twisted, was offering explanations…
‘I can’t see her. The old woman who whistles.’
‘You always hear her first. And afterwards. It’s as if the whistle takes on a life of its own.’
‘What does she look like?’
‘Not very big. Little round curious eyes, slightly feral. Quite thin, though you’re not aware of that because she always wears one of those long stockman’s coats. And a hat.’
‘I think I need to talk to her.’
‘You won’t get much sense out of her.’
‘I’d like to try.’ Might help Bliss. ‘Betty, if you don’t want to stay here, Mr Kapoor’s still in his shop.’
‘Nah. I’ll stay with Jerry. And his ancestor.’
‘Lock the door then,’ Merrily said.
Robin didn’t look up as he skirted the marketplace into Castle Street. A lot of people on these streets now, drifting out of the pubs: the Blue Boar, the Wheatsheaf, Kilvert’s. Sticking together, some women weeping. He’d looked everywhere for Jones and Bliss; no sign. When the lights came back on, most of the customers had left Gwenda’s Bar. Including Gwenda and Gore.
The videotape had gone. Might’ve been knocked off the VHS player. Might’ve been taken in the blackout. One of the women behind the bar said this kind of outage had happened a few times; Gore had kept saying the bar needed rewiring but nothing had ever been done.
Robin didn’t think this was down to bad wiring.
He felt alienated. Locked out of the public grief, but he hadn’t known this kid. Wished he had.
He went through the familiar opening between darkened shops, alone in Back Fold.
Well, not quite. Might’ve expected this.
There he was, outside the cafe, long closed.
‘Gore,’ Robin said.
‘Wanted a word, Robin.’
He wore a short leather jacket, over tight jeans. And gloves. The moonlight had turned his close-cut beard into a mask.
‘Caused quite a stir in there, Robin.’
‘I get overtired.’
‘What’s this all about?’
‘You don’t know?’
‘Let’s assume I don’t. Who’s pulling your strings?’
Why was he wearing gloves on a warm night? Despite his private school accent, he was… well, a dull kind of guy, especially compared with the flamboyant Gwenda. His mother.
Too much information.
Robin said, ‘You watched the tape yet?’
He didn’t reply. He probably wouldn’t’ve had time to screen it, even if he’d snatched the tape as soon as the lights went out.
‘You knew about it?’ Robin said. ‘You knew there was a tape in the wall?’
‘No.’
‘You knew it even existed?’
‘No.’
‘Not a big old family secret?’ Robin was starting to lose it with this guy, helpful, obliging, diffident Gore. ‘I was thinking with your old man being the star. Playing the killer.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘And Gwenda directing the movie?’
‘So you’ve seen the tape, have you, Robin?’
‘Yeah, I’ve seen the tape.’
‘What does it show?’
‘It’s not
Toy Story 3
.’
‘And does it have anything to do with me?’
‘Aw, Gore—’
‘Answer my question, Robin, and then I might go.’
‘I don’t think so.’
Robin stood in the middle of the alley. They were no more than eight or ten paces from a street with people on it. Cops cruising past. Behind Gore, Kapoor, in his shop, with his VCRs.
Gore moved. Robin lifted his stick, a reflex, and it was just as Bliss had said.
It’s a bastard, isn’t it, being disabled?
Didn’t even see it coming, like a wrecking ball into a crumbling building. Pain like a hot blade, a gloved hand wrenching his head back, leather fingers between his teeth choking his scream as he went down, and his head was crunched, once, twice into the tarmac.
He could see the doorway of the Cricket Shop, a dim light behind it and he clawed at the road, crawling away like a boot-flattened insect, the moon shining like a searchlight in his eyes. He looked up to see the castle leaning back, and he could hear its rumbling, stony laughter like it was travelling along the overhead power cables on the central pole around which the whole alley was spinning in his head.
Gore’s black-booted foot coming back.
65
The darknesses
T
HE WHISTLING WASN
’
T
constant; you kept losing it, down among the arterial streets Claudia Cornwell had spoken of. Down past the medieval market place where Beryl Bainbridge had walked,
entrusted with the old marketplaces.
You could hear the whistling through the Buttermarket’s pillars, no particular tune to it any more, but high and piping, like you imagined faery music, underlaid by the old heartbeat, night-drumming, and the gasp and rumble of sporadic traffic up on the main road.
She’d never been very good at talking to old people until she’d become a vicar and found that, with half the average congregation well over seventy, it was a skill well worth developing. The past was always a good way in. Old people were experts on the past, and this town at night was all past, preserved in warm stone, patches of light, hollows of darknesses… and was that a long coat and a hat, hurrying past the post office and into a side street sloping down?
The old lady who knew that Cherry didn’t do it any more. Whose middle-aged self seemed likely to have known and even cared about the young woman who came down from the Convoy to turn tricks in Hay.
Every old community had a living
genius loci
, spirit of place, the ambulant mind of the town. In Ledwardine, it had been Lucy Devenish, the folklorist, Jane’s mentor – still there, you felt, sometimes, in the cottage where Lol lived— God, what if he’d
called? She’d kept switching her phone off to save the battery, and she hadn’t spoken to him since the night of the M-word. It was like he was part of a different sphere of existence.
Down past the poetry bookshop, past the modern-ish library, through moonlit streets and streets the moon couldn’t reach, and then there was traffic noise and she was out on the bottom road, and behind her was the pointy, gothic tower where the clockface was shining like a coin, like a second moon.
Past the turning to the bridge over the Wye to Radnorshire, down to where the buildings and the lights thinned out in the approach to England, and here was the whistling again, like a trail of bailer twine, unrolling past the hump of ground where the town walls had been.
Maybe this was all pointless, but it was doing something, and Merrily felt her head clearing into an overview. Felt the gathering of ghosts in the town of books. A melding of minds, the atmosphere in certain spots made denser by presences. Unseen.
Well, seldom seen.
Most of the medieval town walls have gone… but still there, the stones taken to build houses and shops, so therefore still in the town. It’s
all still here.
Did it work, this transference of mental energy? Did it hold up against the powers of government and big business and the sneers of science?
Vehicles continued to go past, one a dark blue police van. Where were Bliss and Gwyn Arthur Jones? Had they managed to stir it in Gwenda’s Bar, provoke a reaction? Last of the mavericks, off the walls, but what else worked in Hay?
Wouldn’t take much tonight.
Oh God, there she was… a glimmer of movement up ahead, a figure encased in grey from the top of her head to the ground.
She called out.
‘Mrs Villiers…?’
But she wasn’t there. She’d turned off somewhere.
The buildings had become more widely spaced. A wispy
breeze came in from the river. A sense of the river was on the air. The river you couldn’t see. Always a river you couldn’t see.
Merrily began to run.
The night was setting around him like concrete. And, Jesus, the fear when he managed to roll over on the tarmac, expecting another kick or a pumping leathered fist, black knuckle coming for his forehead like a killing blow in an abattoir.
A door opened and a carpet of light was unrolled across the alley, a complexity of moving shadows bundled out. Nobody speaking, just an indrawn breath, a gasp, the crack of wood on stone or tarmac.
Robin cringed.
Against the white light falling through the doorway of the Cricket Shop, he saw Jeeter Kapoor wielding the cricket bat that had hung over his cash register, a chain still hanging from it. In a slick of light, Robin saw his faithful stick, with the ram’s head, lying on the tarmac, and he went crawling after it as the bat came down, ineptly, on leather and Gore’s leather hands reached up and grabbed it.
Then there were more hands, Kapoor spinning round.
‘Hey! Get off me!’
As Gore Turrell was back on his feet, and Robin saw Betty running down towards him, and he screamed over his shoulder, through the blood from his lips and nose.
‘Stay there! Call the cops!’
Reaching his stick, propping it up in front of him, and he began to climb it with his hands, a wild agony bounding up his back. When he made it to his feet, he was sobbing with pain, but he still hefted the stick, went back into the fight.
Until the stick was snatched away. The cricket bat taken from Kapoor. Robin turned, and the man behind him was like seven feet tall, wearing a suit and a tie. A second man, less formally dressed, looking like shit, accepted the stick from the tall guy and offered it to Robin.
‘This is my colleague, DC Vaynor,’ Bliss said, low-voiced. ‘You’ve done very well, pal, but let’s not get overexcited.’
Robin made out the Mr Punch profile of Gwyn Arthur Jones silhouetted against the Cricket Shop doorway, as Bliss and the tall guy moved in on Gore.
The tall guy had handcuffs ready.
‘George Turrell,’ Bliss said brightly, ‘I’m arresting you for assault. You don’t have to say a friggin’ thing, but it may harm your defence if you don’t mention, when questioned, something you later rely on in court. Anything you do say…’
Robin leaned back into his own fist, knuckles in his aching spine.
‘Goddamn cops,’ he said to Kapoor, blood trickling from his nose. ‘Same the world over.’
She ran past a couple walking slowly down and crossed the road and into the narrow lane, not much more than a track by the side of the vet’s clinic. Mrs Villiers could only have come down here.
A little moonwashed car park at the end of the track, under an industrial building, a small, windowless concrete castle, rough lawned areas in front of it. You could read the sign: sewage works.
A short slope down to a brown pebble beach, creamed by the moon as it slid into the water.
The Wye. Wider than you expected, an arcade of black trees on the far bank. To your right, another dip, another narrow beach alongside a stream feeding into the river.
The mouth of the Dulas Brook, had to be. Where they found the effigy of the King. All the way from the mountains and it met the Wye beside a sewage works.
If you didn’t know that, it would look charming, quite exotic in the moonlight. Two cars were parked here for the night, and there were lights in a house just up the bank.
And was that actually Mrs Villiers?
Sitting in her long coat, leaning against the strong wooden fence of a private dwelling, high up on the bank of the Dulas Brook. Half shadowed, not whistling, just watching the moonlight on the water?
Merrily walked towards her, then stopped.
There was someone else, just below the concrete edge of the car park, also looking across the river, and then turning. You could hardly avoid talking to her.
‘Are you OK?’ Merrily said.
She wore a tunic, elegant and expensive, over black leggings. Both hands clasped around a long champagne flute between her knees. Her make-up was smudged and her eyes were pale under the moon.
‘Could be better, darling,’ she said.