The Cure of Souls

glance at the stove in case it was pumping black smoke.

It wasn’t.

Then Lol’s voice: ‘Merrily…?’

His normal voice – no wheezing, no coughing. He wasn’t getting it; none of the others were. She began to utter in her head the lines of St Patrick’s Breastplate: Christ be with me, Christ within me…

Hand to her mouth, she crossed the room and pulled open the door leading to the hop-store-turned-living- room. Rushed in and grabbed a wooden dining chair to wedge the door open.

Christ behind me, Christ before me…

Huw Owen coming through. What’ve you forgotten, Merrily? Huw putting them through their paces in a Victorian chapel in the Brecon Beacons. DOORS! All of them… cat-flaps… cupboards… open and wedge… firmly… come on… it’s not a joke! Do it! Open and wedge! OPEN AND WEDGE!

She dragged open the door of the huge old fridge… a cold, white bulb blinking on inside. Then the heavy door began to swing back on her and she pulled down two bottles of Chardonnay from a shelf inside to set on the flags and wedge it open. When she turned back into the room, Lol was moving towards her.

She croaked, ‘No!’

One of them must have jogged the hop-crib table, because the chalice instantly tipped over and the red wine began dribbling into the cracks in the wood. Why hadn’t she put away the sacrament when her plan for the Eucharist was shelved? Why hadn’t she done that?

She snatched the flask of holy water to safety as the spilled wine dripped down and pooled in the outline of Stewart’s bloodstain on the flags below.

When she could manage to speak, she said, ‘It’s all right. Not what I thought.’ It came out both hoarse and shrill, no kind of reassurance.

What she meant was: It’s not Stewart Ash. Something was loose, playing with her senses, but it wasn’t Stewart.

‘Grant, Lord—’ She broke off and took a deep breath, watching droplets of holy water from her flask twinkling in a channel of sunlit dust. ‘Grant, Lord, to all who shall work in this room that in serving others they may serve you.’

But in her voice, the recommended blessing for a kitchen sounded as potent as watered milk. She’d blown it. She’d been unprepared, had come in here, unforgivably, as a partial sceptic, her mind absorbed by something else, and whatever was here had known it and gone for her and only her.

What is it? What’s here? Who are you?

She cleared her throat, hands trembling around the flask. She could still taste the sulphur. Stephanie Stock was watching her, amused, as if storing up the whole event for a party anecdote – Stephie’s famous impression of the loopy woman who thought she was an exorcist.

‘The living room?’ Merrily asked.

Gerard Stock nodded. He kept glancing at the small pool of wine on the floor, now a stain on the stain.

Coincidence? Coincidence!

But Stock was sweating, wet patches the size of dinner plates under each arm. I’ve lost it, Merrily thought in horror, I’ve let it through. It’s come through me! She was aware of Lol watching her intently, as if there were only the two of them here. Lol, who rarely judged, almost never condemned – because he was a loser and a wimp, he’d insist.

Stock began to lead the way into the living room. She stopped him, a hand on his arm.

‘Gerard, I think I… need to go first.’

How ridiculous that must sound from the smallest person in the place, and plainly incompetent. She saw Stephanie suppressing a smile, with difficulty. And then she goes, ‘Gerard, I need to go first…’ Howls of laughter.

In the living room, the only smell was a faint aroma of mould from the two heavy armchairs and the lumpy sofa. Merrily called on God to unite all who met therein in true friendship and love. It sounded trite and hollow. She saw a wood-burning stove and over it a framed photograph of a younger, slimmer Gerard Stock with two people she didn’t recognize and the late Paula Yates.

‘Bedroom?’

Of course, she should already have known where it was. She should have been up there already. Should have been all round this place.

‘Through that doorway,’ Stock said, ‘and the stairs are on the left.’

‘Thanks.’

The bedroom was instant vertigo.

Lol came last up narrow, wooden stairs that were not much more than a loft-ladder, passing through where a trapdoor must once have been, joining the Stocks and Merrily on the platform where hops had once been strewn to dry. It was floor-boarded now, but it didn’t feel safe, somehow – probably because you emerged gazing straight up into the apex of the big timber-lined cone, the witch’s hat of the hop-kiln, all that dark-stained wood rising to the wind-cowl.

Someone had switched on lights – metal-cased bulkhead lamps bolted to the sloping walls. Just as well; the only windows up here were like the arrow slits in a church belfry. On a stormy night, Lol thought, it would be either wildly exhilarating or terrifying.

‘We’ve got quite a lot to do up here yet, as you can see,’ Stephie Stock said, as if they were potential buyers viewing the place.

‘Shut up,’ Stock rasped.

What a turnaround: bullying, boisterous Stock become all edgy and anxious. Swaggering Stock turned sober and tense. His back to the wall. His back to Stephanie. And to the bed.

The only furniture – apart from a modern sectional wardrobe, its louvred doors now being flung open by Merrily – was a double bed without a headboard, still unmade. Stephie went to sit on the edge, crossing her legs. Lol was aware of a slightly sour amalgam of scents, including – he was fairly sure – hops. Hop-pillows, maybe… or the residue of millions of rustling hop-cones?

Sleep? Fucking hops work like rhino horn. Fact, man. Me and Steph, we’re living in an old kiln, walls impregnated with as much essence of hop as… as the beer poor old Derek can’t pump. My wife… leaves scratches a foot long down my back.

The other Gerard Stock. The one who did not bring his wife to the pub.

From the bed, Stephie gave Lol a conspiratorial smile. Her golden-brown hair was in provocative disarray, her eyes still and knowing; she was now the only one of them who appeared entirely relaxed.

Lol smiled briefly, uncomfortably, turned away to look for Merrily. Something had happened to her down there, maybe just an attack of nerves, and she’d temporarily lost the plot and then recovered. Now she was moving round the sloping wall with her bottle of holy water, and she looked forlorn, vulnerable, like a child.

He felt useless – worse than that, faithless; he didn’t believe this exercise was helping anyone, least of all the murder victim. He didn’t know why they were here at all, what Stock was after. He felt superfluous and embarrassed, an extra. He felt Merrily was being made a fool of – joke vicar. He felt an irrational and unusual urge to put a stop to this melodrama, demand an explanation – what Prof Levin, with style and finesse, would have done ages ago.

Only two people were taking this seriously now, pressing on.

‘Stand up,’ Stock said tiredly to his wife. ‘Please.’ It was clear to Lol now that, whether Stock believed in the power of the Holy Spirit or not, this was something he still very much wanted to happen.

Stephie came languidly to her feet, stood by the bed. Merrily moved into the centre of the room, and they formed a small circle, the boards creaking.

‘Lord God, our Heavenly Father,’ Merrily began, ‘you, who neither slumber nor sleep, bless this bedroom…’

Water flying again like a handful of diamonds. The bedroom formally cleansed and blessed, but nothing, for Lol, seemed to have changed. At the end, flask in hand, Merrily stood at the top of the stairs. Her forehead was