The Cure of Souls

question it. Don’t question anything about this.

Just after 8.35, as she was drying her hands, the phone summoned her back into the scullery.

‘Merrily,’ Sophie said quietly. ‘Can you come in, please – as early as possible.’

Not a question.

‘Problem?’

‘Yes,’ Sophie said. ‘I’m afraid there is.’

Merrily lit her first cigarette of the new day.

It was the usual battle getting into Hereford, with the hundreds of drivers who just wanted to get through Hereford… and the inevitable roadworks. Not half a mile from the Belmont roundabout, southern gateway to the city, lorries were feeding pre-cast concrete into what used to be Green Belt and would, when completed, apparently be known as the Barnchurch Trading Estate.

Merrily found herself winding up the car window in response to a sudden sensation of the air itself being polluted by human greed, like poison gas.

Don’t let’s get carried away, vicar…

The traffic started to move again, and this time she made it all the way to Greyfriars Bridge without a hold- up.

Hereford Cathedral sat at the bottom of Broad Street, snug rather than soaring. Behind it, the medieval Bishop’s Palace was concealed by an eighteenth-century and Victorian facade that made it look like a red-brick secondary school with Regency and Romanesque pretensions.

This was Administration; it brought you down to earth.

The morning had dulled rapidly and a fine rain was falling as Merrily parked the old Volvo next to the Bishop’s firewood pile close to the stone and timbered gatehouse, the quaintest corner of the complex. The view under its arch was back into Broad Street; you went through a door in the side of the arch and up some narrow stone steps and came out at the Deliverance office, with the Bishop’s secretary’s room next door, from where Merrily could hear people talking – two male voices. She didn’t know what this was about, hadn’t liked to ask on the phone because it had been clear that Sophie was not alone.

Now Sophie appeared in her doorway. She wore a silky, dark green sleeveless dress and pearls. Always pearls. And also, this morning, a matching pale smile. She slipped out of the room, to let Merrily go in.

‘Ah,’ said the Bishop.

The other man, elderly with grey and white hair, didn’t say anything, and Merrily didn’t recognize him at first.

‘We’ll have tea later, Sophie,’ Bernie Dunmore called out, and then lowered his voice. ‘We shall probably need it. Come in, Merrily, take a seat. You know Dennis, don’t you?’

Oh God, it was, too. Since she’d last seen him, Canon Beckett had shed some weight and his beard. He looked crumpled and unhappy.

‘Dennis?’ Merrily went to sit in Sophie’s chair by the window, overlooking the Cathedral green and the traffic on Broad Street.

‘I, ah… imagine you can guess was this is about,’ the Bishop said. He sat across the desk in the swivel chair he used for dictating letters to Sophie, his episcopal purple shirt stretched uncomfortably tight over his stomach. The Bishop was looking generally uneasy. Canon Beckett just looked gloomy, sitting on a straight chair a few feet away, with his back to the wall.

‘Dennis’s presence offers a clue,’ Merrily said.

‘Merrily, did you go to see this girl Amy Shelbone on Saturday evening, when her parents were out?’

‘Well, I…’ Merrily glanced across at Dennis, who was inspecting his hands. ‘I went over with the intention of talking to her parents, actually. They were – as you say – out. But I met Amy in the garden. I tried to talk to her about – obviously you know what about, Bishop. I mean, Dennis has presumably filled you in on the background?’

‘The child behaved in a disturbed fashion during the Eucharist, as well as exhibiting symptoms of what appeared to be clairvoyance, plus personality changes… enough to convince her parents she was being, ah, visited by an outside influence. You, however, seem unconvinced.’

Merrily nodded. ‘She did seem to have turned away from God, but it seemed to me more like disillusion. Or, if there was an influence, then it was an earthly influence.’

‘You didn’t offer the parents any suggestions as to how she might have become susceptible to whatever was influencing her?’

‘I wondered about a teacher, or a boyfriend.’

‘Boyfriend?’

‘But her mother insisted she didn’t have a boyfriend.’

‘Quite immature for her age,’ Canon Beckett mumbled.

‘The girl went to church with her parents yesterday,’ said the Bishop. ‘Did you know that?’

Merrily raised an eyebrow. ‘No.’

‘Not to Holy Communion this time. To the morning service.’

‘She was all right, then?’

‘Dennis…?’ The Bishop swivelled his chair towards the Canon.

‘She was fine, as far as I could see,’ Dennis said. ‘I kept a close eye on her, obviously. She was a little quiet, sang the hymns somewhat half-heartedly. It seems she and her parents had had a long talk the previous night. After… Mrs Watkins’s visit.’

The Bishop swivelled back to face Merrily across the desk. ‘The child admitted to her parents that she’d been caught up in certain activities involving other pupils from her school. One girl in particular.’

‘Activities?’ Merrily tilted her head.

‘You don’t know about this?’

‘Am I supposed to?’ Was she being naive?

‘Spiritualism,’ the Bishop said. ‘The ouija board. Making contact with… the spirits.’

‘Amy?’

‘Seems unlikely to you?’

‘It would have, at first. She really didn’t seem the sort. Far too prissy. But then—’

‘Prissy?’

‘Inhibited, strait-laced, unimaginative, if you like. But then, on Saturday night, she said – fairly contemptuously – that she didn’t see any point in trying to talk to God, but if she did want to talk she could talk to someone called Justine.’

‘Her mother,’ Dennis Beckett said.

‘What?’

‘Her real mother. She was adopted by these people. Her real mother was called Justine.’

Merrily closed her eyes, bit her lower lip.

‘The apparent opportunity to talk to one’s dead mother,’ said the Bishop, ‘would, I suppose, be sufficient bait to lure even a prissy child into spiritually dangerous terrain.’

Merrily had come down with a bump that was almost audible to her. ‘I’ve been stupid.’ She felt herself sag in Sophie’s chair.

‘Have you?’ the Bishop said.

‘I should have made the connection.’

‘Why?’ asked the Bishop, a lilt in his voice.

‘Why?’

She felt like crying. Driving into Hereford, she’d still felt high, swollen with… what? Faith? Certainty? Arrogance? She’d cast aside her scepticism, opened her heart, broken through – six hours passing like minutes.

Tails. The coin kept coming up tails. She’d been given her answer.

And it wasn’t the answer. It wasn’t any kind of answer. The inspiring and apparently mystical circumstances had obscured the fact that little had been revealed to her. It might even have been misleading.

‘Where did this happen? These ouija board sessions?’

‘You don’t know?’