The Cure of Souls

up.’

‘Mrs Sharkey?’

‘Never mind.’

‘Well, thanks for calling back, Mrs Sharkey. Hold on a moment. Ah, Sinead, you don’t fancy getting me a tuna on rye from the sarny bar? Plus whatever rabbity morsels you allow yourself. Excellent, thank you. This enough? Cheers.’ Pause. ‘Right, Mrs Sharkey, we’re on our own. Bloody hell, that was a bit of a turn-up, wasn’t it?’

‘A turn-up. Yes, it was.’

‘You know about the video?’

‘Video?’

‘All right, I’ll be honest. I knew Stock had the place bugged and wired up for sound and pictures. He told me himself.’

‘Did he?’

‘He had one camera wedged into a shelf at the time, and of course it fell over while I was there, and it was dangling by the strap. He asked me if I’d mind keeping quiet about it. Said he was convinced he was going to get something mind-blowing on tape that would prove he wasn’t making it up. That’s why I said I believed he was on the level – I couldn’t tell you, I’d agreed to say nothing.’

‘That’s OK.’ Thanks a bunch.

‘Besides, I was thinking, if he does get something mind-boggling…’

‘Seems like he has,’ Merrily said.

‘You reckon he thought something might appear during the exorcism?’

‘You’re just trying to find out whether I did one or not.’

He laughed. ‘All right, forget it. Anything I can tell you, stuff you might not know? No notes, no recording, swear to God.’

‘What did you think of Mrs Stock, Fred?’

‘Good question. Er… well, the first thing I thought was, he’s landed on his feet there, hasn’t he just, jammy bugger?’

‘Meaning what’s a clapped-out old drunk doing with a charming young thing like that?’

‘I wouldn’t say say charming. Sexy. Not beautiful, but she’d got a certain… It’s funny, he was going on about what it had done to them, living in that place, making them withdrawn, nervous, all this… and she kept very quiet while I was there. But after it came out about the murder, when we’d got all we could in the village, I drove into Hereford and hung around outside the secretarial agency where Stephanie worked, back of Aubrey Street, and I had a word with a few of the girls when they came out. And I got just a completely different story.’

There was a tapping on the door. Merrily glanced up as Sophie let in a man who had to stoop in the doorway. She saw grey and white tufted hair, a face like a tired horse. David Shelbone?

‘In these situations,’ Fred Potter said, ‘you’re just after kind of, “We’re all absolutely shattered, she was a lovely person who remembered everybody’s birthday” – predictable stuff, because this is the victim and it usually helps if the victim’s a nice person. You normally find the workmates or the neighbours’ve already had the cops round and the initial excitement’s worn off a bit. But on this occasion, as it happened, I was in there first. These women didn’t know about it.’

Sophie offered the visitor a seat. Merrily put a hand over the phone, whispered, ‘Sorry, I’ll be one minute.’

‘So what I was getting was genuine, off-the-cuff reaction,’ Fred said. ‘The women looking at each other, shocked, naturally, gasps of horror, as you’d expect, then grilling me for information. But the quotes I was getting from them were not what I was looking for. In the end I put the notebook away because I was getting a load of stuff I couldn’t have used – asking more questions than it answered. And we weren’t going to get any answers, not now, with her dead and him—’

‘Questions?’

‘What I was getting was not a lot of genuine sorrow, to be honest. She’d worked for that agency four or five months. When she first arrived, she seemed very, very quiet. Very proper, very polite, butter wouldn’t melt. The kind, if she met a bloke on the stairs, she’d shrink into the wall to avoid him brushing against her.’

‘Stephanie Stock?’

‘And when she talked about her husband, it was like he was some sort of guru – her mentor, her guardian. Gerard this, Gerard that. “Oh, I don’t know, I’d better ask Gerard.” “No, I don’t think Gerard would approve.” This was when she talked at all.’

‘So what happened?’

‘She changed.’

‘Damn right she changed,’ Merrily said.

‘Not overnight; it was a continuing process. If I’d been writing it up for the tabs, I’d’ve had the girls saying something like, “Stephanie was very quiet at first and hard to get to know, but the job really brought her out of herself, and in her last few days she’d been full of life and getting on with everybody.” ’

‘Meaning?’

‘You’re clergy, Mrs Watkins. I can’t…’

‘Oh, sod off—’ Merrily looked up, uncomfortably, with a strained smile for Mr Shelbone.

‘All right,’ Fred Potter said. ‘There was a bloke upstairs, an accountant. Divorced. Sports car. There’s always one, isn’t there? The one no woman likes to meet on the stairs on a dark morning. The one where they always prefer to hold open the door for him, yes?’

‘I know.’

‘Again, this is one of those bits where the girls’re exchanging knowing glances, and frankly I don’t think any of them knows exactly what happened between Stephanie and this randy accountant. But someone saw her coming down from his office one lunchtime, and after that the man was very subdued.’

‘More than he bargained for?’

‘No, he was actually scared – that was the consensus. I don’t know if this was an exaggeration, but they said he was working from home the rest of the week. Like he was frightened.’

‘You serious?’

‘Yeah,’ Fred said. ‘Yeah, I am actually.’

‘These women – they didn’t like her.’

‘I think it’s fair to say they did not like poor Stephie. One of them started whispering that she was probably a bit mental, and who knows what her husband had to put up with, and then another one’s shouting, “Hey, this isn’t going to be in the papers, is it?” and of course that was it for me – everybody clams up. Well, no way was it going in the papers, even if he didn’t get charged last night – this is the victim; if you make a victim sound too much like a slag, the level of interest goes right down.’

‘Meaning the amount of space you get, the amount of money…’

‘Well… yeah.’

‘What about the haunting? Did she ever talk about that at work? I mean, she must have, after that spread in the People.’

‘Somebody apparently said something like, “How can you go on living there?” but she just laughed, and then the boss sent her off to this garage, Tanner’s, temping, so they never saw her again.’

‘What’s the name of the agency?’

‘The Joanna Stokes Bureau.’

Merrily made a note. ‘Thanks, Fred.’

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I’ve been wanting to tell somebody. It’s like I’ve been carrying her around.’ A little laugh, part cynical, part embarrassed… part something else.

‘It’s different, isn’t it,’ Merrily said, ‘when a murder victim is somebody you knew, however slightly. Somebody you’d seen not long before it happened.’