The Cure of Souls

‘I shouldn’t have gone in with you,’ Lol said. They’d both had to make full statements, which had taken another hour and a half. ‘It isn’t as if I was any use in there.’

The three of them were hunched close to the window, as if putting on lights might draw the eyes of the world. Siege mentality already.

Sophie looked at Lol. ‘Mr Robinson, were you posing as a qualified psychotherapist when you went into the kiln with Merrily?’

Merrily smiled wanly. ‘He’s not good at posing. Even if he was qualified, you’d never get him to admit it.’

‘Quite,’ Sophie said. ‘So there’s no real argument, is there? A – neither of you was suggesting that Mr Robinson was there to fulfil the psychiatric or psychological function. B – this was a minor exorcism-of-place, for which a psychiatrist would hardly, in normal circumstances, be considered essential anyway.’

‘That’s not how it’s going to read, though, is it?’ Lol said.

‘The fact remains,’ Sophie told him severely, ‘that, for reasons of her own – resentment, religious antipathy, whatever else – Detective Chief Inspector Howe is fabricating a spurious scenario.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Merrily almost howled. ‘A man’s murdered his wife. Would that still have happened if I hadn’t gone there and done what I did? Possibly. But possibly not. And possibly not is enough to hang me. But more than that—’

‘Just don’t hang yourself first,’ Lol said. ‘You know really that you didn’t have a choice.’

‘—more than that, I’ve got to live with the killing of a young woman. And the inference – the increasingly strong inference – that it… it doesn’t work. Or when I do it, it doesn’t work.’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ Sophie snapped.

‘So what do you think God’s telling me?’

‘Look.’ Sophie raised a finger. ‘If – if any one person can be said to carry any blame here – and I don’t necessarily accept that anyone should – then it has to be The Reverend Simon St John, doesn’t it? Whatever St John knew about Stock to convince him to stay out of it, he kept it to himself.’

‘You don’t understand…’ Merrily lit a cigarette and, for once, Sophie didn’t frown. ‘I was approaching this right on top of the Amy Shelbone issue.’

‘Oh, Merrily, that—’

‘No, look…’ Merrily glanced apologetically at Lol. ‘I’ll explain this properly sometime but, in essence, I was being accused of not responding to a situation with sufficient effectiveness. Following which, a young girl tried to take her own life.’

Sophie hissed, exasperated. ‘For heaven’s sake, Merrily, Dennis Beckett—’

‘Look at the facts: here’s me driving down to Stock’s place this morning with a head full of Amy Shelbone and, like, totally insufficient background about Stock’s own problem – in fact, not really believing he has a problem. And then, while talking to him and coming to realize there is a situation, am I not then subconsciously thinking, God, I can’t underplay this one as well? Less concerned with finding out what the hell’s going on than with covering myself? Was I—’

She stopped, realizing her speech was becoming swollen by sobs, and aware of Sophie getting decisively to her feet.

‘Drink your tea, Merrily. Pull yourself together.’

Through a film of tears, she saw Sophie walking over to the door, beckoning Lol to follow her.

Sophie Hill almost dragged him down the stone stairs. Her expression was taut and her eyes were like grey stones in the half-light.

‘Mr Robinson, I don’t know what your current relationship with Merrily is, but I think you’ll agree that what we need to do now is get her out of here, before she does or says something from which there’ll be no going back.’

Lol nodded, bewildered. ‘Anything I can do. Anything.’

Sophie took his arm, led him to the foot of the steps and even then kept her voice low. ‘I was very much playing it down in there, as you probably realized.’

Lol nodded. He instinctively liked Sophie, wished she didn’t have to keep calling him ‘Mr Robinson’.

‘This is actually rather grim.’ She opened the door leading out to the stone archway. ‘We both know that the press and the Church of England are going to hang Merrily out to dry, and if she thinks she’s in any way at fault she won’t even fight back.’

He remembered Merrily in Howe’s office, what he could see of her: cowed, shattered. ‘In any situation, she always tends to feel responsible.’

‘All right,’ Sophie said, ‘let’s examine the situation. First – I can’t see them charging Stock with murder tonight, can you?’

‘Not unless he’s had a change of heart and given them a full statement.’

‘They won’t charge him even then, not immediately. And you know what that means.’

‘Gives the press free rein to rake over the story. They go back to the original piece in the People and they find that quote from Merrily saying she’s going to be looking into it carefully, and they’ll want to know if she ever did.’

‘And whatever answer they get will be the wrong one. If she didn’t actually do anything, the Church was being fatally neglectful. And if they find out the truth…’

‘Merrily’s dog food,’ Lol said.

Sophie stood in the gatehouse doorway, gazing through the stone arch towards the Bishop’s Palace yard. An elegant, white-haired Englishwoman with a cardigan draped over her shoulders. Formidable.

‘I don’t know how much you know about the Church of England, Mr Robinson, but I can tell you with some authority that, like any large secular organization, it’s essentially self-serving and self-protective.’

Lol said nothing. It was hardly a revelation.

‘For the Church, it’s going to be more than Merrily on trial, it’s the credibility of the entire Deliverance Ministry – arguably one of the few dynamic arms we have left. They may not even try to defend her, simply wash their hands of it all. They’ll have an inquiry, at the end of which they’ll agree that she behaved in an arbitrary fashion, reacted too quickly, disregarded the guidelines, failed to take advice.’

‘Can they throw her out of the Church?’

Sophie looked him in the eyes. ‘With what you know of Merrily Watkins, would they need to?’

Merrily stood at the window, staring down at the evening light on Broad Street. Stephanie Stock’s severed head lay in the middle of the road. She wondered when Stephanie’s head would no longer be visible everywhere she looked, with its smile slashed to double-width and one of its eyes fully open – and the other one missing.

In fact, she realized that she and Lol must have been spared the worst. They’d only seen Stock’s video. The police’s own footage, while it might have less narrative tension, would be far more explicit. She’d heard Frannie Bliss and Andy Mumford talking in the corridor, and so she knew that Stephanie had not died by having her head cleanly cleaved off, like Anne Boleyn, but that Stock had gone at her, at the bottom of the stairs, like some barbaric Dark Age butcher.

This had happened immediately in the wake of what the papers would inevitably describe as an exorcism. A botched exorcism. Howe hadn’t exactly been concealing the existence of Stock’s video; its contents would inevitably be leaked.

And had this supposed exorcism, it would be asked, brought out something savagely malevolent, long dormant inside Gerard Stock?

It wouldn’t matter that, unlike Michael Taylor, Stock had not been personally exorcized – no induced convulsions, no speaking in guttural tongues, no green bile, no Out, demons, out. Wouldn’t matter that it had been simply a modest entreaty to God for the Stocks’ home to become dweller-friendly again.

Merrily’s fists tightened. How could that possibly cause a man to go into a murderous rage? How could it?

It wouldn’t matter.