The Cure of Souls

‘Mother of God, no, it’s a blow-up of a picture she sent to Tit Bits or Reveille – you remember those old glamour magazines? Looking for a career as a pin-up or a model. It was found after she disappeared. The family had copies made to show around, to see if anyone had seen her. They had to conduct their own search, in the end.’

‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘Ah, in those days, as Sally may have said to you, people from ethnic minorities were not considered proper people.’ His eyes were quiet this morning. ‘Even the beautiful ones.’

The back room of the Hop Museum was not open to the public because it also served as a workshop. It ran the length of the main building, and the two shorter walls were lined with racks of hand tools, probably antiques in themselves. There were a pair of elderly wood-lathes and a bench with a Bunsen burner attached to a liquid-gas bottle. Guitar parts – necks, pine tops, bridges – hung from walls and beams. There was a rich composite aroma of glue and resin and wood.

And hops, of course. The scent of hops was unavoidable in this place.

In a white waistcoat and a spotted silk scarf which, Merrily recalled from childhood, was called a diklo, Al had welcomed her with a small bow and a kiss on the hand. Now he was moving around the workshop, picking up guitar fragments and gently putting them down. A sign down by the road had said: MUSEUM CLOSED ALL DAY.

They were still waiting for Simon St John.

‘What do you want me to do?’ Merrily asked Al. ‘I’m afraid I don’t really have as much time as I’d have liked.’ She’d told him as much as she needed to of what had happened after she and Lol had left Knight’s Frome last night. ‘And I’ll need to be there, obviously, when the police come to talk to Jane.’ Al was nodding, but she could tell he was somewhere else.

Jane might sleep for hours yet, Eirion had kept insisting. You go. I can tell this is important. And when she comes down we’ve got a lot to talk about, haven’t we?

At least it wasn’t far; she could be back in just over half an hour, if necessary. If they could hold off the police until this afternoon, that would help. She’d already called Mumford, asked if this was possible. Mumford had said, We’ve found a knife, by the way.

Al was still nodding his goblin chin. ‘By one o’clock, it should be over. By one, we’ll have done all we can do.’

‘But are we trying for the same thing?’

‘To bring her into the light,’ Al said.

‘But is it the same light?’

‘Light is light, drukerimaskri. You know that.’

‘I suppose.’ She didn’t even know if he was a Christian. ‘Where’s Sally?’

‘Gone for a walk. Coming to terms.’

‘How happy is she – about what you’re proposing?’

‘Ah…’ He picked up an unstained guitar neck, only half fretted, held it up to one eye and looked along it. ‘Well, she thinks we should have acted on this when we first suspected something was arising. I tried. I talked to Stock, way back. Told him to sell the place to Lake, take his wife away from here.’

‘Did you?’

‘Ah, but Stock’s patting me on the shoulder, patronizing, like I’m this colourful old rural character. Perhaps I should’ve had more patience with Stock, told him I was Boswell the guitar-maker, but I didn’t want him to know. Consequently, perhaps, I don’t suppose he believed a word I was telling him.’

‘He must have believed something in the end. He went to Simon St John. And then he came to me.’

‘Poor Simon, he doesn’t want to do this, even now. He’s afraid for himself, and for his wife. He’s afraid of what he might bring down on his wife.’

Merrily didn’t quite understand, but it was clear that nobody seemed to be entirely happy about this, perhaps not even Al himself.

‘Then why today?’ she asked him. ‘Why the hurry?’

‘It’s not a hurry for me, drukerimaskri.’ He put down the guitar neck. ‘I’ve had years to prepare.’

‘Why you?’

‘Because I’m the only Romany left. And because it’s always been my responsibility.’

‘Why?’

Al peered around the workshop, as if to record every detail in his mind. As if to hold a memory of it.

‘I think Simon’s here,’ he said.

The address Frannie Bliss had given him proved to be a three-storey Victorian terrace on the main road out of Leominster. Lol parked the Astra half on the pavement, from where he could see the numbers on the front doors.

The man he was looking for lived in the ground-floor flat at the far end of the terrace, but he owned the whole building, Bliss had emphasized, as if this explained something.

Lol sat there for ten minutes, the car slowly turning into a roasting tin around him. He thought about Simon St John, who had once said, This is the country, Lol. In the country, in certain situations, everybody lies. Had Simon himself really been telling the truth this time? Had he genuinely been too scared to attempt to exorcize Stock’s kiln? In which case, why hadn’t he referred it directly to Merrily instead of trying to claim Stock was making it up? Lol concluded that in an irrational situation people acted irrationally. How would Merrily react? Would she help Simon now, despite everything?

Stupid question.

No time for stupid questions.

As Lol got out of the car, the front door at the end of the terrace opened and a man in a light blue suit came out.

Lol stayed close to the Astra. The man didn’t look behind him, or towards Lol, as he walked out of the entrance. Could this actually be the right guy – wide shoulders, stiff white hair? Stop him now? Accost him before he got into his car?

But the man didn’t go to a car. He walked briskly along the pavement. When a woman passed him, he said warmly, ‘How are you, my dear?’ Glanced up into the sky. ‘Make the most of it, it’s due to break today, I hear.’ Rich, rolling local accent.

Lol followed him to where the road widened and you could see a junction with fields beyond. But before that there was a big Safeway supermarket, a commercial palace with a tower, set well back behind its car park. The man almost skipped down the steps towards the supermarket. Lol waited until he’d reached the bottom and was strolling across the car park towards the entrance, before following.

He watched the white-haired man go through the automatic door. Hesitated. Was he supposed to challenge this guy across the fruit counter, maybe block his trolley in one of the aisles?

Lol went through the door, through the porch, past Postman Pat and his black and white cat in their van, and on into the store. He looked from side to side: a dozen or so customers, none of them a man in a blue suit – maybe he’d gone to the Gents’. Lol moved further into the store, uncertain. He felt conspicuous, so he picked up a shopping basket from a stack. He felt hollow. He was hollow. He couldn’t do this.

The voice was very close to his left ear.

‘Looking for me, brother?’

A clock made out of a breadboard with a six-pointed star on it put the time at ten-fifteen a.m.

‘Why noon?’ Merrily asked bluntly.

Simon St John exchanged a glance with Al.

Al was sitting straight-backed on his stool, determinedly defiant, with his hands in the side pockets of his waistcoat. Simon St John, however, looked as wrecked as his jeans.

‘When we travelled,’ Al said, ‘we camped at night, but we always stopped the wagons at noon: the time of no shadows. Do you understand? Noon is the dead moment in time. When the day belongs to the dead – all the energy of the day sucked in. Sometimes, for a fraction of an instant, you can almost see it, like a photograph turned negative. Everything is still, everything – the road, the fields, the sky – belonging to the dead.’