The Cure of Souls

‘This morning. It has to be done at noon.’

‘What does?

‘Al and I agreed this seems to require a more… customized procedure. There’s a traditional Romany form of exorcism. I believe they have a word or phrase meaning soul-retrieval, but I’m buggered if I can remember it.’

A shadow fell across the desk. She turned in her chair. Eirion stood there. ‘Oh.’ He backed away. ‘I didn’t… sorry.’

She waved to Eirion that it was OK. ‘It’s all a bit of a rush, isn’t it?’ she said to Simon St John.

‘Well, it…’ She picked up either crackle on the line or some agitation. ‘Al’s in a state. A bad way. And I suppose I’m—’

‘What time did you say?’

‘Midday.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it has to be. Al will explain. We were planning to meet as soon after ten as possible.’

‘I don’t know if I can make that.’

‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘I just… thank you for your—’

And now he did hang up.

Lol grabbed the ringing phone, hoping it was Merrily. He’d given up trying to call her at the vicarage. Last night/this morning, he’d forgotten to ask for her mobile number. He hadn’t been to bed. He was rediscovering, on the far shores of fatigue, a state of heightened consciousness produced by a cocktail of body chemicals that he suspected was only rarely mixed. It happened sometimes after a whole night in the studio. Afterwards, the hangover would be awesome, but right now he was floating on a luminous pool of awareness.

‘Good morning, Laurence,’ Frannie Bliss said briskly. ‘You’re up then. Gorra pen?’

‘Not on me.’

‘Good. Don’t get one.’ There was the unmuffled sound of main-road traffic; Bliss was clearly outside, on a mobile. ‘Some night, then, in the end, eh? Quite a few added complications to this Shelbone business, sounds like. What’s Merrily’s take on it?’

‘Haven’t spoken to her for a few hours.’

‘Never mind, not my case anyway. Let’s leave that alone; time’s short. I got in early this morning, couldn’t sleep – bloody full moon. And I was thinking about what you were saying, about Mrs Stock. So I had another look in Stock’s computer – we brought his computer in; fascinating, all the things a computer’ll tell you about its owner. I got into his Internet files – you click on “history” and the computer very kindly tells yer all the Web sites Stock and his missus have been into the last months or so. Now, what was the general subject that most interested one or the other or both of them over the past few weeks?’

‘Gypsies?’

‘You’re on the ball this morning, son. Aye, there’s about ten files on the general subject of gypsies. Which I already knew about, of course – and no big mystery there because that was Mr Ash’s main interest, too. But I did begin to detect another element coming through. Either Stock or Mrs Stock was going back to the same sites, following up particular angles. Gypsies and Death was a popular one, gypsy death rituals and gypsy ghosts and evil spirits.’

‘The mulo?’

‘Exactly. The living dead. You wouldn’t want one, would you? The female version might be all right at first, but she’d start to wear yer out after a while. Couldn’t keep up, could you. Go bloody mad.’

‘Especially if you were already having problems down there.’

‘Precisely. Now – what would you do to get rid of it? Several suggestions came up on this one particular Web site – you could drive steel or iron needles into the heart of the corpse, or a hawthorn stake through one of its legs. Or you could simply… chop its head off. Isn’t that interesting?’

‘It is, isn’t it?’ Lol said soberly.

‘Course, this is corpses, and I think we can assume Mrs Stock was not one of the walking dead. But then if, as you suggest, the normally rational Gerard had come to believe his wife had been taken over by one of these things, and if she was making demands on him he was failing to satisfy – and if he’d got in an exorcist to sort her out…’

‘And if, the minute the exorcist had left the premises, Stephanie appeared to be unaffected or even…’

‘Go on.’

Perhaps even perversely stimulated by it, Lol thought.

‘Maybe prayers focused on helping Stewart Ash didn’t quite hit the spot,’ he said. ‘But how was Merrily to know that?’

‘How indeed? Because Stock wasn’t telling the truth, was he?’

‘Why break the habit of a lifetime? You going to tell Howe about this?’

‘Not yet. Anyway, it might not have the desired effect coming from me. She’s the governor, she decides what line we take. She could tell me to leave the gypsy stuff alone, and that’s me silenced.’

‘Would she?’

‘She might. But let’s talk about the disappearance of this gypsy girl in the autumn of sixty-three and the recent murder of Stewart Ash. What’s the connecting factor between these two events?’

‘There is one?’

‘There is, my son, long as we agree you never heard it from me.’

‘Sorry,’ Lol said. ‘Who are you, again?’

‘Good boy. Listen, this is something I can’t help you with beyond what I’m about to say. Might be something or nothing. Either way, you’ll have to follow it up for yourself. Cherished reputations at stake. I didn’t go through official channels, because you leave tracks that way, but I did put in a call, first thing, to a former copper, who I won’t name, who used to be based at Bromyard and, as it happened, was one of the PCs involved in what you could describe as the less-than-intensive search for Rebekah Smith. And who, as a local man, was well aware of all the rumours about the womanizing activities of the late Mr Conrad Lake. You with me?’

‘All the way,’ Lol said.

Merrily brought some tea over to Eirion at the kitchen table.

‘How is it?’

‘Oh, you know, bit sore… stiff.’

‘Couldn’t sleep?’

‘Not really.’

‘Is there anything I can do?’

‘Well, I’m supposed to go back and have the dressing changed this afternoon.’

‘That’s not quite what I meant.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Can we talk?’

‘We can try.’ Merrily sat down.

The dressing was on his upper arm, just below the shoulder. The woman doctor in Accident and Emergency, stitching up the gash, had said the point of the blade didn’t seem to have quite penetrated to the bone. Dafydd Lewis had started saying he’d come over at once, take the boy back to Withybush Hospital at Haverfordwest, but Eirion had insisted he wanted to stay here and see this through. Besides, he assumed the police would want to talk to him again.

‘Anyway, I don’t deserve any sleep,’ he said to Merrily. ‘If we’d stayed out of it, this would never have happened.’

‘You should never say that. Perhaps something even worse might’ve happened.’

‘Personally,’ Eirion said, ‘I really can’t conceive of anything worse than what did happen. How’s Jane?’

‘Sleeping.’ She’d put Eirion in one of the bedrooms on the first floor.

‘Jane’s in a bad way about this,’ he said.

‘I know. She thinks she was guilty of rather demonizing Layla.’

It was the first thing Jane had said when Merrily and Lol had arrived at the Barnchurch: Mum, I got her deeply, deeply wrong. We started talking, and gradually she was like really normal – like a friend, a mate… oh God! Jane was looking like the time when, as a very small girl, she’d found a pot of raspberry jam and got it all over her face and down her front; only it wasn’t jam this time and it was even in her hair, so much of it