The Cure of Souls

was doing A levels, hoping to become a doctor. This was what the court was told.

The father, Wayne Jukes, was twenty-two, an ‘assistant manager’ at a night club. What this actually meant was that Wayne had been responsible for selling various stimulants to the punters. He also did a little pill-peddling around the schools and colleges, for a bit of extra cash, and that was how he met Justine. Wayne wore nice suits and a tie and was smooth and plausible. He had a Toyota sports car, so it didn’t take long.

Justine’s parents were disappointed, naturally, but they thought Wayne was a presentable enough boy, with an apparently promising managerial position. They helped Wayne and Justine get a house, a little semi on a not-bad estate, ready for the baby.

David Shelbone knew all these details from the Social Services people in the Black Country and in Hereford. He’d also gone out of his way to obtain the inquest and court reports in the local papers – destroying them, of course, before Amy learned to read. He’d even traced Justine’s parents. David was very thorough: anything that might help understand Amy better, he and Hazel wanted to know.

Justine had been very young, had never really wanted this baby, found it awfully hard work, especially with Wayne out most nights, pursuing his junior managerial role. Justine, at home with the infant Amy, had very rapidly become depressed, and it became clear that Wayne Jukes had taken to slipping her a little something to make life seem easier. Sometimes he’d even keep her company.

They thought they were cool, rising above it. They thought because he was in the business somehow that meant they could control it. And they were young, too young for life to appear seriously bad. When you were young, you bounced.

It was a long time before Justine’s parents realized what was happening. By then, Wayne was himself using more than he was selling – too far gone to realize he was being eased out of the club operation because he was becoming untrustworthy, careless, a risk.

And the mortgage wasn’t getting paid, and the baby cried too much and Justine complained sometimes – to the extent that Wayne had found it expedient to give her a little tap from time to time.

David Shelbone was telling the story in his colourless, hesitant way, but Merrily was seeing it in harsh documentary flashes, hearing the voices, the accents, the head-spinning, squashy, bloody, sobbing reality of those little taps.

There was a serious falling-out with her family, and Wayne and Justine sold the house and got a small flat in a run-down area, at the end of one of those streets that went on for ever, a greasy ribbon of tatty garages and betting shops, chip shops, half-dead pubs.

At the very end was a church, which had been a big parish church back in the days when this had been a village street but now had a congregation of about seven pensioners. Some days Justine would retreat into the church, taking the baby, when Wayne was in one of his moods.

Which was most days, because Wayne was drinking heavily now as well. He’d made friends in one of the half-dead pubs and Justine had found it best not to be around – or to be there but completely out of it – when Wayne got home.

It was worse at night, obviously. A neighbour, who cleaned the church for the vicar – who had four other collapsing congregations to try and shore up – became concerned for Justine and gave her a key to the side door next to the vestry, and some nights that was where Justine would go, carrying the baby and a carving knife in case there was anyone already in there.

And one night there was.

Wayne had been wondering for a long time where Justine went, the times she wasn’t there when he came home in need of some kind of action. So one night he left the pub twenty minutes earlier than usual and waited in a derelict doorway across the street and followed her when she came out with the kid. Next day, he found the church key in the back pocket of Justine’s jeans and had a copy cut for himself.

And that same summer night, when Justine came into the church with Amy, Wayne was waiting for them behind the dusty, moth-eaten drapes in front of the vestry door.

It might have ended differently if Justine hadn’t done some business of her own that afternoon with a bloke she and Wayne used to know when Wayne was at the club – a bloke who gave her a little something for her trouble. If Justine hadn’t shot the little something into her arm before she came out, if she hadn’t been up there and ready for anybody, Wayne included, it might have ended with just a few more little taps.

‘And Amy saw all this?’ Merrily said. ‘How old was she?’

‘Nearly three.’

‘Dear God, that’s old enough to absorb everything. Even if she had no conscious memory, it would all be there.’

‘The Social Services were very careful about where she was taken,’ David Shelbone said. ‘The grandparents didn’t want her – they’d recently taken in an elderly relative, and, well…’

‘Mmm.’

‘It was an emergency, obviously. They wanted to get the child well out of the area, and we were experienced, reliable foster-parents, unencumbered at the time. We were approached, told the background. We were fully prepared.’ He fell silent.

‘And?’

‘Nothing to cause alarm. Not ever. No particular problems at all – and, believe me, Hazel and I have coped with some very taxing children in our time. But Amy settled down remarkably quickly. No nightmares beyond the norm. Nothing to suggest suppressed memories of violence. She was always a very well-balanced, if rather serious child. Our daughter. We both decided very quickly that, if at all possible, she should stay with us and become our daughter.’

‘There were no indications at all that she might have remembered something?’

‘Not until… I mean, yes, I have sometimes wondered if her serious and rather… orthodox approach to life didn’t reflect a subconscious need to impose an order that would in some way cancel out the chaos of her early years. But it’s not something that’s greatly worried me, and Hazel was always most emphatic that Amy should never be exposed to any kind of psychological assessment. We were naturally glad when she – without any coercion from us – began to embrace Christianity from quite an early age… perhaps four or five. Hazel always believed that if she ever required solace she would find it there, rather than in counselling or therapy.’

Merrily recalled Hazel Shelbone’s reaction to the suggestion that some kind of psychiatric assessment would be needed as a preliminary to exorcism.

‘What did you tell her when she asked you about her real parents?’

‘We told her we understood there’d been an accident – and she never questioned that. We always accepted that there may come a time when we’d have to tell her the real truth, but not until she was old enough to deal with it.’

‘So when, after years of going happily to church, she suddenly knocked the chalice out of Canon Beckett’s hands and—’

‘It all ended at the altar, you see,’ David Shelbone said. ‘That’s the point. That was what frightened us the most.’

No one knew exactly how it had ended. Wayne Jukes had presumably either decided or been told that it would help his defence if he was unable to remember anything after emerging from behind the curtain to find the baby sitting on the font and his wife crouched, snarling – the Kitchen Devil glinting in the feeble light, swishing the air.

Less than half an hour later, police – summoned by neighbours who had been afraid even to go in – found the threadbare chancel carpet already slippery with blood, Wayne standing in the aisle, with his face opened up from eye to chin, Justine vomiting blood over the altar rail.

Amy sitting on the altar itself, laughing.

‘Justine had stab wounds to the lungs, throat and stomach,’ David Shelbone said. ‘She died in the ambulance.’

The trail of blood apparently suggested that Justine had first slashed Wayne and then picked up the child and run to the chancel, the trail of blood along the aisle showing how Wayne had blundered after her.

‘She’d put Amy on the altar and then either she’d put down the knife in horror at what she’d done, and he picked it up and attacked her with it… or he overpowered her, and in the struggle—’

‘What happened to Wayne?’