The Cure of Souls

Me in the toaster.

She was desperate for a cigarette, but she wouldn’t give Howe the satisfaction. She was also desperate for silence, somewhere to collapse and think and, if necessary, scream. Nothing made any sense. Nothing had made sense for days. She felt a welling hatred for Gerard Stock and a bitterness towards Simon St John who had known enough to shut the door in his face.

‘Happened near Barnsley, in Yorkshire.’ Howe was back behind her desk. ‘In the mid-seventies. I know most of the details because of the pseudo-Satanist person we found in the Wye last year. I called up some background on Satanism and related issues, and this case was the first to come up on the screen.’

Merrily closed her eyes and inhaled on an imaginary cigarette. This was one of Huw’s cautionary favourites, which Howe would just love relating.

‘Michael Taylor was thirty-one, a good Christian, a family man – and a member, with his wife, of some local religious group. At some point, for reasons I’ve never found entirely understandable, he came to believe he’d been taken over by the Devil.’

Howe had a set of files on her desk. She opened one and extracted a cellophane folder.

‘Two church ministers agreed that Taylor appeared to be possessed by evil, and they spent all night trying to exorcize him, claiming to have expelled – I think – forty demons – the statistical exactitude here obviously adding important credibility to what most people might consider an inexact science. However, Taylor left the priests early the following morning, went home—’

‘I know,’ Merrily screwed up her eyes in anguish. ‘I know what he did, there’s no need to—’

‘He went home and, with incredible savagery, attacked his wife with his bare hands.’

‘Yes…’

‘He tore at her skin, ripped out her tongue. And her eyes.’

Merrily leaned her head back, stared at the ceiling.

‘Eventually, she choked to death on her own blood,’ Howe said.

‘And Taylor claimed, in his statement to police’ – Merrily’s voice was starved; she couldn’t look at Howe – ‘that he loved his wife very much but there was an evil inside her that had to be destroyed.’

‘Not, I think it’s fair to say, the Church’s finest hour.’

‘Exorcism of a person is a complex and dangerous process,’ Merrily said. ‘But this… this case wasn’t anything like that.’

‘Wasn’t it?’

‘It wasn’t an exorcism. I made that completely clear to Mr Stock from the start. I even decided to hold off the customary Requiem Eucharist because it might look too much like Christian magic. It was prayer, that’s all – prayer as the first stage in dealing with a suspected spiritual presence, there being no reason to suspect any demonic infestation.’

‘Let’s go back to Taylor,’ Howe said. ‘Found not guilty by a jury for reasons of insanity. Caused quite a stir, didn’t it?’

‘What should be said about that verdict… although Michael Taylor had been, by all accounts, a friendly and popular man with no history of violence, nobody – not the judge, nor the jury, nor the media – seemed prepared even to consider that he might actually have been possessed by a metaphysical evil.’

‘He was considered insane.’ To Howe the difference between insanity and possession would be indiscernible. ‘His mental decline appears to have coincided with his taking up membership of a Christian group. His recourse to almost unimaginable violence immediately followed his so-called exorcism by two Christian ministers, isn’t that true?’

Merrily could only nod, knowing now where this was going – a goods train with a toxic cargo inexorably picking up speed, and nothing she could do to stop it.

Howe was still flipping through the file on her desk. ‘I’m trying to find what the local bishop said at the time.’

‘I can tell you more or less exactly what he said.’

‘Here we are… “Exorcism is a type of ministry which is increasingly practised in Christian churches. There is no order of service for this; it is administered as the situation demands. Clearly a form of ministry which must be exercised with the greatest possible care and responsibility.” ’

‘But this was not—’

‘Ms Watkins, the tape clearly shows the sacrament laid out on your impromptu altar, and the sprinkling, by you, of water, which I assume is what you regard as holy water.’

‘The sacrament wasn’t even used, it was—’

Annie Howe wasn’t listening; she was back into the report, flipping pages.

‘Yes… the Taylor case was also commented on by the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Donald Coggan, who said, I quote: “We must get this business out of the mumbo-jumbo of magic. I do not see exorcism as something set off against and in opposition to medicine. Far from it. I think there are many cases where the more rash exorcists have bypassed the work of psychiatrists.” ’ Howe looked up. ‘Partly as a result, I believe, of the Taylor case, there was a re-examination by the Church of the usefulness of exorcism and how such disasters might be avoided in the future. As a result, the guidance now to exorcists is that they should always work with community psychiatric resources. Is that correct, Ms Watkins?’

‘Before an exorcism is carried out on an individual, it’s recommended that they should be seen by a psychiatrist, to make sure they aren’t, for instance, schizophrenic. Yes.’

‘And when an exorcism takes place, it’s advised that a qualified psychiatrist should be present. Is that correct?’

Merrily sighed. ‘Yes.’

Howe rearranged the papers in the report, applied a paper clip and slipped them into the folder. She smiled pleasantly at Merrily.

‘So, is your idea of deploying community psychiatric resources – in carrying out a ritual that might loosely be described as “mumbo jumbo” at the behest of a notoriously unstable, possibly alcoholic, individual – to take along with you—’

‘That’s not what—’

‘—take along with you, as your expert medical consultant, a former psychiatric patient with a police record?’

‘You stay the fuck away from me!’ Stock screamed. ‘You do not come near me!’

He was backing into shot. His shirt had come out of his trousers. The sweat patches under his arms were the size of hi-hat cymbals, Lol thought.

And it was all so beautifully bright. This was what video did; it compensated for the conditions. Clear and clinical, then, even if the quality was not great; Bliss had said these were quickly made VHS copies of the two originals. The one they were looking at was wide-angle, evidently shot from a camera position just above the fridge. The constant picture included all of the table and an area of flagged floor about three feet around it.

On the table were Stewart Ash’s book on hop-growing, and a wine stain.

Frannie Bliss froze the tape.

‘I think, boss, that this bit gives the lie to the theory that this whole thing was like some big theatrical production… that he even had an idea how it was gonna end. Whatever she’s doing now, you can tell he’s not expecting it.’

‘Not necessarily,’ DCI Howe said. ‘We can’t even see Stephanie at this point. We don’t know that she’s doing anything. She might not even be there. This could be part of his act.’

‘He’d have to be bloody good.’ Bliss started up the tape again.

Stock was shaking. He just stood there trembling, almost full-face to the camera. His beard was shiny with sweat and spittle.

The fridge noise was rumbling out of the TV speaker. Lol thought of rocks before an avalanche. He thought of Stock in the seconds before he’d spouted a gutful of sour beer over Adam Lake. He prayed that both Stock and his wife would be out of shot when the killing happened.

‘If I didn’t know the circumstances, I’d say he was shit-scared,’ Bliss said. ‘What would he be scared of, Merrily? What could she be doing that would put the fear of God into him?’